A four mile wide Black Lives Matter public art piece was recently discovered in the Black Rock Desert, the site of the yearly Burning Man festival.
A four mile wide Black Lives Matter public art piece was recently discovered in the Black Rock Desert, the site of the yearly Burning Man festival.
A four mile wide Black Lives Matter public art piece was recently discovered in the Black Rock Desert, the site of the yearly Burning Man festival.
A four mile wide Black Lives Matter public art piece was recently discovered in the Black Rock Desert, the site of the yearly Burning Man festival.
The Black Rock Desert in Nevada is no stranger to ambitious pieces of public art. Best known as the location of the yearly Burning Man festival (which will go online in 2020 due to the pandemic), the inhospitable sandy landscape is now the site of an anonymous and unsanctioned art piece made out of tire tracks that reads “Black Lives Matter.” With each letter approximately 50 feet wide and the entire piece four miles in length, it may be the largest of its kind in the world.
The Reno Gazette Journal reported that the Bureau of Land Management stated that the art was created sometime last month, and given the scale, relied on GPS guidance and would have required a vehicle to retread it’s path several times to create such a deep impression, with a 13-mile circumference circle surrounding the text.
The precision of the text is best appreciated in an aerial video shared on Reddit by pilot Nick Howard.
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Esteban Valle, a local burner and medical student, photographed the site and described the enormity of the project. He compared the ground-level perspective to viewing one pixel of a larger image, and that it would be difficult to decipher the message, but it’s clear that the marks were purposeful. Based on his observations of the site, he believes the project to be much more ambitious than the Bureau of Land Management stated.
“As a rough estimate I’d say someone put between 1,000 and 1,500 miles to make this sign,” Valle told SFGATE, who posted photos from ground-level on Reddit. “That’s not including the time spent surveying, which was meticulous. Way beyond the capabilities of a basic “GPS” like the Bureau of Land Management claimed. Each letter stroke was precisely surveyed and flagged to within inches, including the corner radii, before it was driven.”
Valle goes on to describe two dozen flags left behind used to plot out the text. Given the scale, he believes the project required hundreds or even thousands to achieve such detail.
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Neither Black Lives Matter nor Burning Man has claimed credit for the work, and some local officials have questioned the environmental impact on a population of fairy shrimp that breed on the playa. The project also brings into question the Burning Man principle of leaving no trace and perhaps foreshadows other unofficial messages that may be created at the site this year given the festival’s cancellation.
Dan Gentile is a digital editor at SFGATE. Email: [email protected] | Twitter: @Dannosphere