Black Rock Arts Foundation

Case Statement

How did this organization or project start?

The Black Rock Arts Foundation was established in May of 2001 in response to the need to promote community-based exhibitions of interactive art and support the artists and organizations that create it.

Over the past several years, Black Rock City LLC, the legal entity that produces Burning Man, has distributed over $600,000 in grants to artists to help fund projects that are interactive and support the event's mission of building diverse communities and artist networks through the creation and exhibition of interactive art.

Each year, a handful of artists and artist networks creating theme-related art are selected and awarded grants directly from the citizens of Black Rock City through the form of ticket revenues. Since 1999, as participants have continued to organize and veteran artists conceive of more ambitious works, the capacity of artists to create new and impressive art has expanded exponentially. During this same period, the actual population of the city has increased by only 10% each year. This means that we have reached the limit of what can be contributed to the artists from ticket revenues.

At the same time, artists and artist communities who have produced art with Burning Man grants have expressed an interest in exhibiting their work outside of Black Rock City. The Black Rock City LLC also sees the need to expand the audience to a more diverse group of participants through exhibiting these interactive art projects in communities across the United States.

For this purpose, several members of the Black Rock City LLC, as well as several parties not involved with the Black Rock City LLC, formed a new non-profit corporation and filed for tax-exempt status with the IRS in July 2001.

Describe why your organization is needed and how this was determined?

There are currently no dedicated sources of arts funding that address the explicit support and facilitation of interactive art, despite a 45-year history of such work going back to Allan Kaprow's Happenings of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Artists are poorly educated in the development of collaborative strategies and techniques for artistic production and non-institutional audience development. The Black Rock Arts Foundation facilitates a laboratory for the development of such an education, which will be increasingly necessary as we move from a society based on institutional hierarchies toward a society based on informal project-driven networks.

Some, but not many, expert opinions, research articles and works describe the need for interactive art. The New Dionysianism , by Mark Van Proyan, New Art Examiner, July/August 1999, functions as a kind of manifesto for this type of art. Happenings, by Terry Kirby, is currently out of print. Also of interest is the collection of Allan Kaprow's writings that is available from UC Press (edited by Jeff Kelly).

The history and literature on the need for this type of art is quite extensive. Anna Halprin's work in experimental dance also looms quite large, and the European history is huge. The catalog for LA MOCA's "Out of Actions" exhibition (1998) is an excellent resource.

What is the mission or primary goal of the organization?

The mission of the Black Rock Arts Foundation is to support and promote community-based interactive art. For our purposes, interactive art means art that generates social participation. The process whereby this art is created, the means by which it is displayed and the character of the work itself should inspire immediate interactions that connect people to one another in a larger communal context.

The primary goal of the Black Rock Arts Foundation is to promote a revival of art's culture-bearing and connective function by removing art from its context in the marketplace and reintegrating it into communal settings.