Art Theme
2017 Art Theme: Radical Ritual

Art & Performance
Building an art installation or mutant vehicle? Planning to perform? Building a stage or performance space? Talk about it here.

Theme Camps & Villages
Theme camps and villages are the interactive core of Burning Man. This is the place to announce and discuss camp and village plans for Burning Man 2017.

2016 Art Theme
Da Vinci's Workshop is inspired by the Italian Renaissance of the middle fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when an historic convergence of inspired artistry, technical innovation and enlightened patronage launched Europe out of medievalism and into modernity. Our story will focus on the republic of Florence, for it was here, in a city-state of about the same size and population as Black Rock City, that humanist ideals, a rediscovery of science, and funding from a newly moneyed class of entrepreneurs fueled a revolutionary cultural movement that redefined Western civilization. Five centuries later, we will attempt to recreate this potent social alchemy by combining Burning Man art, maker culture and creative philanthropy to make Black Rock City the epicenter of a new renaissance.

2016 Art & Performance
Building an art installation or mutant vehicle? Planning to perform? Building a stage or performance space? Talk about it here.

2015 Share Resources
Materials, expertise and rides...whether you need them or have them to share, you can tell people here.

2015 Theme
Carnival Of Mirrors asks three essential questions: within our media-saturated world, where products and people, consumption and communion morph into an endlessly diverting spectacle, who is the trickster, who is being tricked, and how might we discover who we really are?

2014 Theme
Caravansary - This year we will create a caravansary that occupies the crossroads of a dreamland: a bazaar of the bizarre wherein treasures of every sort, from every land and age, flow in and out to be flaunted, lost, exploited and discovered. This is not a tourist destination, but a home for travelers who come here bearing gifts. Amid the twisting and the turnings of its souk, participants will come upon an inexhaustible array of teeming goods and unexpected services. Anyone may pose as 'merchant' here, and anyone may play a 'customer', but nothing in this strange emporium shall have a purchase price — no quid, no pro, no quo — no trade at all will be allowed in this ambiguous arcade. According to a rule of desert hospitality, the only thing of value in this 'marketplace' will be one's interaction with a fellow human being.

2013 Theme
Cargo Cult - Who is John Frum? He is known to us by many names, this Visitor from Elsewhere, dispenser of endless abundance and wielder of mysterious technologies: John Frum, Quetzalcoatl, Osiris, "Bob." His cargo is splendid, his generosity boundless, his motives beyond our understanding. But across the ages and around the world, the stories all agree: one day he will return, bearing great gifts. Our theme this year asks three related questions; who is John Frum, where is he really from, and where, on spaceship Earth, are we all going?

2012 Theme
Fertility 2.0 - Black Rock City is a kind of Petri dish. Theme camps cling in fertile clusters to its latticework of streets, artworks tumble out of it, like pollen on the air. These nodes of interaction mutate, grow and reproduce their kind. Burning Man communities have now escaped this capsule world: our culture in a Petri dish has effloresced - it spreads across five continents. This year's art theme contemplates the tendency of any being or living system to create abundant life.

2011 Theme

2010 Theme

2009 Theme

2008 Theme

2007 Theme

2006 Theme

2005 Theme
Our 2005 theme explores psychology: self-expression, self-reflection and the unconscious power of dreams. Discuss.

2004 Theme: the Vault of Heaven
What does it mean to you?