2013 Burning Man Map of Black Rock City, Nevada

This is a 2013 map of Black Rock City, Nevada, the temporary city created by the annual Burning Man Festival. Brilliantly colored and designed in a style reflecting the 'radical self-expression' defining the event, the map is both a guide and a work of art.

A Closer Look

The map covers Black Rock City, a series of concentric arcs of named 'streets' (1.5 miles in diameter) centered around the Burning Man effigy that pass between the festival's various art installations, theme camps, and the campers and other vehicles of the festival-goers. The street names reflect the values of the festival, including the annual theme, which in 2013 was John Frum and Cargo Cults in Melanesian cultures. The city even includes a bus depot and a temporary airport, which has been recognized by the Federal Aviation Administration since 2009.

The map's background is a collage of magazine clippings, roughly matching the hue of the festival's desert landscape, with numbers and text written on them; the intended message appears to reflect the anti-consumerist ideals of the festival. The verso includes a list of several hundred theme camps and villages, as well as basic information on medical care, food and refreshments (especially ice), law enforcement (handled by the Bureau of Land Management and Pershing County Sheriff's Office), and community policies and guidelines.

Burning Man

Originally started at Baker Beach in San Francisco, Burning Man is an annual event that since 1990 takes place in late August in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada (the exact location has changed somewhat several times), where tens of thousands of people gather to create a temporary city called Black Rock City. It is centered around community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance. The event, defined by mass-scale spontaneous artistic creation, culminates with the burning of a large wooden effigy known as 'The Man.' Originally drawing participants from countercultural, underground, and Bohemian circles, the event has in recent years become wildly popular, attracting tens of thousands of attendees, and struggled to maintain its founding principles in the process. The 2013 festival marked a significant increase in the number of attendees in previous years, just shy of 70,000, making it the largest Burning Man up to that date. Since 1998, the festival organizers have published an art map that is as beautiful as it is informative.

Publication History and Census

This map was issued by Black Rock City LLC, which later the same year reorganized as the Burning Man Project in San Francisco. Several individuals are listed in the 'Map and Guide Credits' section on the verso, including Lisa Hoffman, a San Francisco-based artist who worked as a map designer for Burning Man between 2001 and 2015, Terry Schoop and Erika O'Connor, long-time employees of Black Rock City LLC/ the Burning Man Project, and Rod Garrett, who had passed away in 2011, but who had first laid out the temporary city created by the festival in its distinctive horseshoe shape in 1997. Though this map would have been distributed widely among festival participants, its ephemeral nature means that few survive. The OCLC notes a single example of this 2013 edition, held by Harvard University.