Larry Harvey

For other people named Larry Harvey, see Larry Harvey (disambiguation).
Harvey answers, "Why do you do what you do?" with a quote from the book Nostromo, by Joseph Conrad. When asked why that's not enough, he answered "you also have to be willing to assume the responsibility."

Larry Harvey (born 11 January 1948) is the main co-founder of the Burning Man festival, along with his friend Jerry James.[1] What started in 1986 as a summer solstice evening ritual burning of their artistic creation of an effigy of a man with a group of just a dozen people at San Francisco's Baker Beach soon became an annual event that over 4 years grew to more than 800 people. In 1990, in collaboration with the SF Cacophony Society, the event moved to Labor Day weekend in the Black Rock Desert, where it has grown precipitously from a 3-day, 80 persons "zone trip" to an 8-day festival with over 50,000 participants.

As the population grew by the mid '90s to top several thousands, the encampment started to be referred to as Black Rock City, it now has a year-round staff headquartered in San Francisco, managing an over 12 million dollar annual budget.

In 1997, six of the main organizers formed Black Rock City LLC to manage the event with Larry Harvey as the executive director, a position he still holds. He is also the president of the Black Rock Arts Foundation, a non-profit art grant foundation for promoting interactive collaborative public art installations in communities outside of Black Rock City.

He scripts and co-chair/curates the arts departments annual event theme and is the main spokesperson and political strategist for the organization. He has been featured in such engagements as San Francisco's Grace Cathedral "Radical Ritual" with the Very Reverend Alan Jones, the Oxford Student Union, Cooper Union in NYC, Harvard's International Conference on Internet and Society as a panelist, the Walker Art Center in Minnesota and the San Francisco Commonwealth Club as well as many others.

References

  1. ↑ Jacques, Adam (23 August 2014). "Larry Harvey: The founder of the Burning Man festival on adoption, uncontrollable rage - and how Freud became a father figure". The Independent.
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