BURN, BABY BURN

A compelling, inclusive exhibition of art from Burning Man comes to the Oakland Museum.

FUTURISTIC, INVENTIVE, KINETIC AND INTERACTIVE art — the essence of Burning Man, the annual Labor Day fest in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert — is the subject of No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man. This traveling show, organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery, debuted on the West Coast in October, and its finale show, at the Oakland Museum of California, runs through February 16, 2020.

“It is really wonderful to bring these works home,” says OMCA curator Peggy Monahan, pointing to the many Oakland-made creations, the likes of which often are seen only at Burning Man. She has placed much of the exhibition in the museum’s hall and gardens and encouraged local artists’ studios that produced many of the pieces to offer interactive programs that bring No Spectators to life.

Staged on a dry lake bed 100 miles from Reno, Burning Man’s so-called Black Rock City encampment encircles a stylized effigy of a man that is burned each year at the end of the event. The extraordinary nine-day gathering of more than 70,000 people has come a long way from its origins: a convivial summer solstice bonfire on San Francisco’s Baker Beach, where a group of friends, including event founders Larry Harvey and Jerry James, burned an eight-foot driftwood figure in 1986.

That ritual began annually attracting artists, all seeking a kind of unfettered creative common space, and the burgeoning festival moved to Nevada’s desert in 1990. Since 2000, temple structures made from recycled materials by artist David Best and other volunteers have been a beloved feature. Other large artworks, crafted elsewhere and assembled on site, joined the “Man,” and fantastic bizarre cars breathing flames and belting out music began to roam Black Rock City’s open playa.

In this enormous madcap “gallery” the stylized Man also grew in size — sometimes higher than 100 feet tall.

Over time, the original free-spirited bohemian participants of Burning Man have been joined, and perhaps overshadowed by, deep-pocketed Silicon Valley tech celebrities and global media artists, but the bohemian spirit endures even in some of No Spectators’ elaborate tech-driven works.

Experimentation, collaboration and creativity infuse the more than 300 art installations that spring up at Burning Man. One of the Oakland studios behind these iconic sculptures, for instance, is the Crucible, an industrial arts education enclave that creates jewelry, costumes, paintings and even some large “mutant’” altered vehicles for the playa.

“Burning Man artists like David Best are our neighbors,” Monahan says. That’s proved an advantage. Since the temple Best created for the Renwick debut show had to remain there, OMCA was able to easily acquire a replacement: Best’s 40-foot-tall version, displayed in the museum’s garden, where people are encouraged to leave remembrances that will be saved and burned at next year’s Burning Man temple.

“Other works actually created for the playa are also exhibited outdoors here, and that made more sense,” Monahan adds. An example is East Bay artist Marco Cochrane’s 18-foot-high Truth Is Beauty, a welded-metal sculpture of a sinuous woman. It is joined by New Orleans artist Candy Chang’s famous participatory creation Before I Die — a chalkboard where people can write their top bucket-list items.

For those who want to delve deeper into Burning Man history, OMCA also presents a companion show, City of Dust: The Evolution of Burning Man, organized by the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno.

Overall, “we really tried to stay close to the Renwick Gallery’s choices,” Monahan says. That guideline, while useful, was hard to stick with, as there are many works temptingly nearby the museum could have added. Instead of doing that, she decided to involve reallife “burners” from the Bay Area as guides to the show.

“The pieces in the exhibition are the result of artists’ collectives or groups of people coming together to make art,” she points out. The museum itself already has an ongoing Burning Man kind of vibe, complete with food trucks and music on Friday nights, and “we are constantly trying to make such connections,” she says.

In that spirit of community, Monahan and her team, along with Rachel Sadd, executive director of East Bay maker-space Ace Monster Toys, added workshops for making origami cranes, necklaces and recycled-material gifts for visitors to take home. Or, perhaps, to burn? n museumca.org/exhibit/no-spectators-art-burning-man

January 15, 2019

Preview Gala Benefiting the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Altman Siegel

Andrew Kreps Gallery

Anthony Meier Fine Arts

Berggruen Gallery

Blum and Poe

CONVERSO

Crown Point Press

David Gill Gallery

David Zwirner

Demisch Danant

Fergus McCa rey

Fraenkel Gallery

Gagosian

Galerie Chantal Crousel

Gallery Fumi

Gladstone Gallery

Haines Gallery

Hauser & Wirth

Hosfelt Gallery

Hostler Burrows

James Cohan

Jason Jacques Gallery

Jenkins Johnson Gallery

Jessica Silverman Gallery

KARMA

Kasmin kurimanzutto

Lebreton

Levy Gorvy

Luhring Augustine

Magen H Gallery

Marian Goodman Gallery

Matthew Marks Gallery

Mercado Moderno

Modern Art

Nathalie Karg Gallery

Nicholas Kilner

Pace Gallery

Patrick Parrish Gallery

Paula Cooper Gallery

Perrotin

R & Company

Ratio 3

Reform/The Landing

Sarah Myerscough Gallery

Sprüth Magers

Tina Kim Gallery

Volume Gallery

BY ZAHID SARDAR MAKERS

IN ESSENCE , muralist Rafael Arana’s innate talent for beautifying spaces parallels what his Salvadoran parents do for a living: housekeeping and window washing.

“I knew nothing about the design world,” he says. But, born and raised in San Francisco alongside his two sisters, this 30-year old was always drawn to doodling. Encouraged by teachers in grade school, “I saw that I could be an artist. I saw that it was possible,” he says.

He went on to study art at UC Santa Cruz and, armed with a degree, he looked forward to being a fine art painter — until a serendipitous introduction to interior designer Ken Fulk’s home-staging business in 2012 spun him into a different, wider world.

For a year he churned out small pieces to be hung in houses that were for sale, as well as “little canvases for kids’ rooms,” Arana says. “Then, slowly my mentors, Daryl Serrett and Philip Buscemi in the interior design department for Ken Fulk Inc., invited me to help with murals. That is how Ken noticed me.” Arana was hired full time in 2013; within a year he became one of several in-house artists and the only muralist and was called on for a range of skillful work, including concept drawings and painted furniture.

“My first big project was painting a mural Ken designed for his dining room in Provincetown,” Arana says. It was supposed to be sketched, approved, enlarged, transferred to the plaster walls and painted in two weeks, but even though he labored on it 16 hours every day, completion took three weeks.

Still, Fulk loved it, and more than a dozen other eclectic, unusual projects followed. For Three Sticks Winery in Sonoma, Arana painted an exterior mural to celebrate General Mariano Vallejo, who was responsible for some of Sonoma County’s first adobe structures; the on-site Vallejo-Castaneda Adobe, built by the general’s brother Salvador Vallejo, has a rich Mexican/ American past that bilingual Arana knows well.

The general and his horse, rendered in a doodling, linear style, are among the artist’s favorites. In the winery’s powder room he painted a colorful pattern of thistles that drew inspiration from the design of a Timorous Beasties wallpaper that would have been impossible to glue onto the undulating surfaces. Drawing in black-and-white against textured adobe comes naturally to Arana, but is not something he gets to do often. “I also work on fine troweled plaster in more rendered styles,” he says.

For instance, in a master bathroom for a house in Vail, Arana painted a moody forest scene with realistic and stylized animals. In San Francisco at Fulk’s Saint Joseph’s Arts Society, in a chapel-turned-banquet-room, he conjured a monochromatic “Roman-style temple surrounded by a California country landscape, to provide a peaceful feeling when you walk in.”

A mural depicting neon signs evoking graffiti artist Drew Straker and a hallway decoupage of simulated comic-book pages “light up” the walls of Detour, a new San Francisco bar.

“Usually a designer has a vision for the artwork and I come up with a sketch on paper or on an iPad,” says Arana, who has become proficient with Procreate software. Although the final design is usually transferred using a grid onto a prepared or primed surface, sometimes he prefers to draw it freehand. In almost every case, though, Arana uses acrylic wall paint from Precita Eyes, his go-to brand because it has a wide range of fade-resistant colors and dries faster than oil paint.

However, one 2015 showcase project, for a House Beautiful kitchen-of-the-year in New Orleans, had to be done in record time, forcing him to find a new medium. He discovered colored pastels. He completed the pastel drawings on textured canvas-like wallpaper in San Francisco; they were then shipped and swiftly installed, with only a little seam touch-up needed at the other end.

“Normally my murals start with a drawing, but here the drawing was the finished piece,” he marvels, thrilled with that development.

Last year, armed with his bigger toolkit and years of experience, Arana set out alone. Based in Los Angeles, he has become an itinerant muralist up and down the coast, and new names on his client roster include Bay Area interior designers Kimberly Rider and Marie Fisher.

Ever versatile, he is happy to bend to a client’s vision but increasingly finds himself leaning toward a surrealist style inspired by Salvador Dali, the surfer/graffiti artist Barry McGee and other creative heroes. Sometimes his lines even resemble those of contemporary Bay Area muralist Zio Ziegler, whose work he admires, and while he hones his craft, he keeps on learning.

“My parents pushed education a lot because they were stripped away from their own when they left El Salvador. For the longest time I was doing well in school just for them,” Arana says. “But now, it is also for me.” n