Portland State Magazine Spring 2018

16 Baker Beach, in sight of the Golden Gate Bridge, and built a 9-foot stick figure, then burned it. They returned each year with a larger figure, and with the crowds doubling annually, in 1990 Larry Harvey and his compatriots moved the event to Black Desert Rock, Nevada. In recent years, up to 70,000 people from all over the world flock there for a late-summer week. To top it off, the Smithsonian American Art Museum currently is exhibiting “No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man,” calling the festival “one of the most influential phenomenons in contemporary American art and culture.” The “No Spectators” theme “caught on from the beginning,” Stewart Harvey says. “You do something; you participate on some level.” –written by Cliff Collins, a Portland freelance writer.  EMERGENCE, 2000 EXPLODING HEART, 2012 TEMPLE OF TRANSITION, 2011