Without the Box Shop, Burning Man Would Just Be a Dirt Rave

The Box Shop, a legendary builder space for Burning Man art, has been forced to move to a new location, also in Hunter’s Point. But before they go, this Saturday they’re throwing a big final dance party blast with the equally iconic dance camp Opulent Temple, which has operated out of the Box Shop since its inception. Proceeds will help recreate the Box Shop at its new home, with tickets and other details available here. 

For an intriguing backstory on the Box Shop and Opulent Temple, we turned to Steven T. Jones, author of The Tribes of Burning Man, which chronicled and popularized the Box Shop’s unique role in creating the Burning Man culture. This is an except Jones wrote for the forthcoming book Box Shop Forever, published here for the first time. 

To me, Burning Man is the Box Shop. That thing in the desert is a great party, but the art and culture of Burning Man are built at the Box Shop and similar workspaces and community hubs around the country. Without the Box Shop and its imitators, Burning Man would have been just a weird little dirt rave, not the enduring cultural phenomenon it became.

Even among the constellation of burner maker spaces in the Bay Area and beyond, the Box Shop has long stood uniquely above the rest. San Francisco is where Burning Man began and has been headquartered ever since, nurtured through its boom years by the Box Shop, the event’s most enduring and influential San Francisco workspace.

The Flaming Lotus Girls and other marquee burner art collectives built mind-blowing artworks for Burning Man at the Box Shop, and by 2005, many of those artworks began returning to San Francisco as public art along the waterfront, Golden Gate Park, and other venues. But even more important was the creative culture and community generated at the Box Shop every day during the long seasons of building big projects.

That’s the essence of Burning Man — it’s the culture, community, and art we create all year long, not the week in the desert where it gets showcased. 

That idea first occurred to me back in 2004 when I was working on attending my second Burning Man, this time with the Opulent Temple sound camp. The camp’s master builder was Rich Martin, who occupied a box at the Box Shop with all his tools, so that’s where we all gathered to help build the O-Pod, a DJ booth that was to be our camp’s centerpiece.

I enjoyed getting my hands dirty and learning to bend and weld steel to build the O-Pod, the first of several increasingly complex iterations for Opulent Temple, all built at the Box Shop. Working with my new campmates on the project helped forge deep bonds that we’d carry onto the playa. But I was also mesmerized by other crews joyously toiling on impossible creations at all hours, particularly the Flaming Lotus Girls, with their sexy countercultural charm.

I was the city editor of the San Francisco Bay Guardian and curious why people devote so much of their time and energies to building big art for an ephemeral city. So I decided to journalistically embed myself with the Flaming Lotus Girls for nine months as they built their next big project, which I wrote about in a long Bay Guardian cover story entitled “Angels of the Apocalypse.”

That experience — learning from veterans and newbies, watching how they navigated challenges and took care of one another, feeling the love and culture they created along the way — only reinforced my view that this was the essence of Burning Man. The Box Shop epitomized the urban tribes who come together to build Black Rock City from scratch every year, the basic building blocks of that thing we call Burning Man.

That became my guiding thesis as I covered the Burning Man culture and organization in the coming years, which proved to be the renaissance of the event, when it blew up into a global phenomenon and worked through various growing pains along the way.

The Box Shop was what I had in mind when I turned all those stories I wrote for the Bay Guardian into a book, The Tribes of Burning Man: How an Experimental City in the Desert is Shaping the New American Counterculture. The desert city was the prompt for that shaping, but those shapes took their form at places like the Box Shop.

Of course, while I believe Burning Man is the Box Shop, it’s clear that the Box Shop and its culture has grown beyond just Burning Man. Art created at the Box Shop has spread to at least 30 cities around the world, while also working with young people from its Hunter’s Point neighborhood on murals and other skills-building projects.

Sadly, after almost a quarter-century of creating art, culture and community at it’s current location, San Francisco’s gentrification is forcing the Box Shop to shut down. Luckily, Box Shop owner and lead artist Charlie Gadeken has found a new home for it, at 1265 Van Dyke Avenue, on the other side of the Hunter’s Point peninsula.

There’s still lots of work to do to bring the new Box Shop to life, from fundraising to challenging logistics. But this is a community that thrives on challenges, so I believe the Box Shop will endure and help nurture new generations of builders and dreamers. Long live the Box Shop.