The ARTumnal Gathering
 

Friday, November 20, 2009

The Bently Reserve

400 Sansome St.
San Francisco, CA 94111

The Black Rock Arts Foundation invites you to the grandest annual celebration of our community’s vital spirit and extraordinary artists.

Once again, we gather in the majestic Bently Reserve to revel in support of  BRAF’s mission to inspire art, community and civic participation worldwide.

Enter into an enchanted world of abundant art, captivating entertainment, and tempting libations. Participate in interactive art experiences created by community visionaries.  Be the art!

Join us for our pre-event dinner for delightful fare, cocktails and auction.

Last year’s event sold out. Don’t miss out this year!

Ticket Information 

Artumnal Celebration

$35 Online presale
9:00 pm – Late
Includes an evening of featured and roaming performances, DJs, dancing, raffle, photography sale and surprises.
$35 presale online, $45 at the door.

Check out the BRAF ARTumnal Site for information about the fabulous music, art and interactive experiences

BUY YOUR TICKETS NOW  

photos from the ARTumnal 2008

More photos from the ARTumnal 2008

And even more photos from the ARTumnal 2008

Artwork by Cory and Catska Ench

We were traveling along Route 80, and for once, Reno seemed almost pretty, or at least the parts of it you see from the highway. In summer you can’t believe how ugly it is, the  big brown  hills of sun-blasted dirt.  But now you were noticing the scattered trees, leaves glowing bright yellow in the slanting noonday sun.

We had to be up in Reno for a couple of days, and we had the chance to squeeze in a side trip to the playa, and we took it. It seemed wrong never to have experienced the Black Rock Desert when there wasn’t a festival going on, and we were determined to rectify the situation.

Now the car is full of playa dust again, and it couldn’t smell sweeter.

Parts of the journey felt familiar. You felt the tightness in your stomach as you left the interstate at Wadsworth and headed out across the Indian land. There wouldn’t be any art or any music or any fire waiting for you at your destination, and all the amazing people weren’t going to be there, either, but it didn’t matter.  You felt the pull. It was just going to be you and the desert and the dust.

Burning Man has always had a quality of aloneness to it. Yes, you are surrounded by 40,000 like-minded souls, and one of the reasons you go is to feel connection and community. But still, there are times when you are alone with yourself, and if you haven’t felt that sense of being a single, solitary person, even in the middle of that  huge party, maybe you haven’t gotten all there is to get at Burning Man. People come to escape the loneliness, but it finds them there, too. Moments, in between,  it finds you.
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Cardboardia one of Black Rock Arts Foundations 2009 Grantees!

Artists! The Black Rock Arts Foundation is now accepting grant applications for community-based, interactive art projects around the world. Apply now!

BRAFs grant recipients represent a range of ideas and interactions worth celebrating. Some of their grantees set out to create highly interactive, publicly engaging work in the spirit of the art experienced at Burning Man.  Others extend existing collective art projects, continuing the momentum and reach of their works.  Others still employ a valuable connection with the emerging Burning Man Regional Network, expanding BRAF’s geographic reach, while nurturing individual artists’ capacity to create works in and with their own local communities.  Seed and challenge grants given in this cycle help artists obtain further support.

Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

We finally lost ACE Junkyard to the ravages of an unreasonable San Francisco landlord. She won only on a technicality, after a long expensive battle by Bill Kennedy, proprietor extraordinaire of ACE Junkyard.

I hope many of you know the wonders of San Francisco’s ACE Junkyard.  If not let me clue you in to the significance of what we are losing.  Bill who is also known to some of as Billy the Junkman, Junkman or even Belinda, has been the purveyor of fine junk in San Francisco for over 25 years and ACE has been THE resource for playa artmaking in Bay Area for over 15 years.  Let it be known Bill has provided an incalculable about amount of funding for playa art in the last 15 years, in the form of JUNK – wondrous, glorious, re-usable, transformable, JUNK!

Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

Over the years this junk has evolved into many ground-breaking forms of art.   Junk from ACE has been transformed into SRL’s machines, SEEMEN’s interactive work and Cyclecide’s pedal-powered carnival.  The list of artists doesn’t stop there. The following incomplete list of artists can all thank Bill for his uncanny ability to find that essential widget or for donating his  Junkyard venue to events like the famous Power Tool Drag Races: Flaming Lotus Girls, Rich Humphrey, Jarico Reese, Laird Rickard, Paul the Plumber, Big Daddy, John Law, Jim Mason, Michael Michael, Simone Davalos, Kimric Smythe, Shannon O’Hare, Sue Glover, Dan Das Man, Karen Cusolito, Scott Gasparian, Charles Gadeken, Kal Spelletich, Mark Perez, and Chicken John.

Come celebrate and say Goodbye to our favorite Junkyard on Saturday October 31st, Halloween at Cellspace 5020 Bryant Street. The Junkyard will be gone, but Bill remains and I’m sure he will figure out other ways to enrich us.

“The other side of it is…. well it was and is worth ever penny of it. The people, events, art, and most importantly to me the parts of myself that I found, and the person that I have become. A large part of who am now is because of the love and support on my family of friends I have made from this place.” -Bill The Junkman

Do you have a favorite ACE or Bill memory?

Sweetthang is the person who draws the lines in the sand

Take your plans and make them real.

For a lot of Burners, it’s a yearlong task. You plot and plan and meet and talk. You have an idea for an art car, and you wrestle with the logistics and the money and the know-how, and sometimes it comes out great and sometimes … well, it’ll be better next year. It’s an evolutionary thing. Same thing with art projects. Oh yeah, it was all going to fit together just fine. Except it didn’t. And then you had to adjust.

It’s like that for a lot of people in the Burning Man organization, too. A lot like that. And no one knows  it better than Sweetthang.

It’s Sweetthang’s job to translate the map of the playa, and the flags on the ground, into actual camp layouts. She has to adjudicate border disputes. She has to confirm (or deny!) where your theme camp begins and ends.

The task  has to be daunting. You know how hard it is to make what appears on your planning sheets actually show up in the desert dust. No, the DJ booth goes over HERE.  And it faces THAT WAY, not like this. And the sun showers go BEHIND the recycle stuff, not in front of them! Sheesh!

Ok, now exponentially increase the complexity of the undertaking. Imagine trying to figure out where it ALL goes, what ALL those flags in the ground are supposed to mean. Oh, the electrical wires are buried here? The spider box goes over there? Oh, then we can’t have the Airstream park like that. It’s got to go over here.

You get the idea.  40,000 people showing up with there own ideas about how it’s all supposed to come together, about where they’re going to set up, but the map says no. And you’re the person who has to figure it out. That’s Sweetthang.

Of course, things happen. Adjustments must be made. Because really, one of the best things about having a plan is changing it.

So the question is this: How’d you do? Did it all come together the way you thought it would? What did you learn this year that’s going to come in handy next year? Tips and tricks for playa preparation are most welcome …