DANA: 

There’s such beautiful diversity in this art. It’s also stuff that you can interact with, climb on, touch, you know. It has a beauty to it that museums often, you know, there’s a barrier and Burning Man art is typically very inviting.

STUART: 

Hey everybody, welcome back. It is another episode of Burning Man Live. I’m still Stuart Mangrum and my guest today is an artist who is, as the saying goes, kind of famous at Burning Man — and increasingly so out in the big ‘capital A’ art world. Since the mid 90s, she’s created no fewer than 12 art installations of Black Rock City, from the iconic Bone Tree to the equally iconic Tara Mechani, one of my favorites. Last year, she built a steel and glass mermaid on an English country estate. She just got back from building a community garden in San Francisco. Joining us from her studio in the Sierra Nevada foothills, welcome, Dana Albany. Hi, Dana.

DANA: 

Hi Stuart, thanks for having me.

STUART: 

I’ve been looking forward to this. You and I have known each other for a long time and I’ve been following your career 

DANA: 

I know.

STUART: for a long time and I’m a huge fan. And I think people will wanna know a little bit more about you and your method and other stuff you got going on. Let’s start with your latest project. You just got back from San Francisco with an installation out there. Tell us about that a little bit.

DANA: 

That’s just a really cool project. It’s a gateway, but it is, when I think about it, I think of it as a portal, because it’s an entryway into this magical garden. It’s been installed at this place called, they don’t technically have a name yet, they’re still working on it, but I call it The Space in Between. It’s the space behind the 101 Freeway and the back of buildings. And it’s sort of that ‘no man’s land,’ you know? This isn’t even off the freeway where people sleep. This is sort of no man’s land. It’s just heavy growth and a lot of the trash from the freeway falls over onto this site and so forth. 

So during COVID, some people in the neighborhood, they decided to clean up one block, and it got infectious. It started to, you know, after one person was back there cleaning it up, they started to plant all these plants, and then they had a propagation area, and it just snowballed, and brought out a lot of people in the neighborhood and the community. And now they’ve gone block after block and it’s still growing. 

But they started off as guerrilla farmers, basically, guerrilla gardeners, and now they’re getting grants. They’re getting all sorts of grants. The Mayor was there. They got a grant for this portal. And they got grants for different muralists to come. So there’s been, I believe, five murals painted behind the buildings now. They’re really incredibly cool and a lot of them are by local artists in the neighborhood. It feels great to be a part of it and make a magical entryway for this garden. 

There’s a school that’s on the street, and the front of the buildings is a busy street, so the kids can’t go play out on that street. But now since this garden has grown to where the school is, the kids come out, they can play, they learn about propagating, they learn about composting, they plant plants, and they have a safe haven to play and run around like children are supposed to have, and it is really a phenomenal space.

STUART: 

Can you describe the portal to us? 

DANA: 

So the framework of it is there’s two pillars on the side and then it’s gates, two gates. They’re metal gates and there’s an archway. And my favorite part of it is that archway. It’s sort of an acorn shape, and then on top there’s sort of reminiscent of a gothic gateway. As you approach these gates and there’s like this beautiful circular area, or oval area, that you look through, and you can see the garden and the magic behind it. 

It’s made out of recycled metals and mainly garden implements and old tools. A lot were given to me by people in the neighborhood and then collected from various flea markets and building resources. So it’s all recycled materials. There’s glass in there. It’s very whimsical. It’s very fun. There’s shovels that have been plasma cut into the ‘tree of life’ and drill bits and bicycle chain and hoes, and a lot of antique garden tools that are awesome, and just beautiful objects in and of themselves.

STUART: 

Your work features a lot of… I mean, I love to get up close and look at the detail because you find such amazing stuff. That, ya know, scavenging or upcycling of crazy interesting oddball metal stuff is a really distinctive feature of your work. Have you always worked in scavenged stuff?

DANA: 

Yeah. I absolutely enjoy it. It’s part of the process for me. I like salvaged materials and I like all these recycled bits and pieces and the possibilities of giving them a whole new life. And the ones that hold history, and even some of these objects I like to use them in the context, not out of context than they’re normally used for, but yet, kind of building blocks or used in a whole different way. I enjoy finding these materials and sourcing them, and definitely it’s a big part of my art.

I like using recycled materials, even if it’s not recycled metals. The Bone Tree for example was definitely for that one I had to scout and collect bones, you know in bone yards and so forth, and that’s different in the sense that it’s an opportunity to be out in nature and walk, you know, and hunt down these bones.

STUART: 

Over the years I’ve seen you use, I mean, gosh, not just metal. You do have a great eye for scrap metal, but also library books and old bottles and bones. Ahh, let’s start, go back to the Bone Tree. Tell us about that. Where did you find that many cattle bones?

DANA: 

Well, I found mainly, I got a big supply by this guy, Jimmy the Bone Man, who was an old friend of my husband, Flash’s. 

STUART: 

No, get out. Really.

DANA: 

Yeah. In Oakland. Kind of scary. He had like, he had garbage cans filled with a lot of bones, 1,000 muskrat skulls that he donated to the Bone Tree. Um. Yeah, it was phenomenal. But that was this massive source that was in the city that was completely unexpected. Most of them were gathered around the Black Rock Desert and the surrounding ranches out there, but Jimmy the Bone Man was a character, and I’ll never forget his 1,000 muskrat skulls. Most of them, they were collected out there in the Black Rock Desert, and it was a fun journey to go and search for these. A lot of walking. 

It’s mainly cattle and a lot of deer antlers for the tree branches on the end. There’s an area sort of they call it the boneyard, but it’s not like, “Gee, I’m going to go pick up some bones and they’re all laying right there at your feet.” You got to walk for miles. It’s a whole area where these animals, if they’re sick, they move them off to this area. If they’ve died, they tend to move them off to this area. But they’re scattered, you know. Even one animal, its bones aren’t generally all near each other. They’re kind of like spread out oftentimes. So you’ll find pieces of the bones slightly spread out. And I think that might be from birds or vultures. I’m not quite sure, but… 

The Bone Tree has a new life right now. It’s kind of exciting. It’s being resurrected and it’s almost doubling in size and it will be placed at Fly Ranch permanently.

STUART: 

Oh great.

DANA: 

And it’s part of a larger land art project so it’s definitely site-specific for the desert. It was intentionally made for Black Rock Desert. It started off as, there was a theme that year, Larry Harvey’s theme was the Wheel of Time. He had asked me if I’d build something, and he wanted something that would travel into the past, and then again, into the future. And so that was the whole idea, or concept, behind it. And he wanted something mobile because he wanted to lead people to the different installations. And at that time, the installations were placed in a circle. They were specifically placed where they started off as a clock wheel, and more of the installations had to do with the past and then it moved into the future. 

What I loved about the Bone Tree is that bones are the windows into our soul. They’re what’s left of us when we’re gone. It’s what paleontologists and archaeologists used to discover more about us, and they definitely are record-keepers. And after we’re gone and vanished it’s our bones that are generally left behind. And so that whole idea of taking something from the past and something that tells the story and creating this cycle of life and death, to put all those bones together into the form of a tree felt like a very beautiful cycle. As well as the fact that there aren’t any trees out on the playa. It’s that vast stark emptiness, but creating this image of life out of death, and that cycle continues onward and onward.

STUART: 

Let’s back up a little bit. How did you get to Burning Man in the first place? Did you go as an artist or?

DANA: 

Absolutely not. No.

STUART: 

Yeah, I read in your bio that you were studying science.

DANA: 

I was studying science, yeah. I had no absolute implication that I would ever become an artist, and that this was the trajectory and the path that my life would take. I went to Burning Man, and like most people was completely just inspired and overjoyed by all the creativity. And I loved the principles behind that anybody could create anything and, you know, the idea of “no spectators” and everybody got involved, and I remember you out there with your tiki bar, and I remember just all the chaos and craziness and the beauty and the excitement. So I had no intention of being an artist. I thought my life, I would work in a lab, you know. I was on this scientific pathway. And then there you have it. I think like a lot of people who end up going to Burning Man, it was infectious. So I decided the next year that I would try to build something. I thought, “Every desert needs a camel. So I’m going to make a camel.” Mind you, I’ve never built anything, so this was a long shot, but I volunteered that next year; they used to build the Man in the backyard of this guy Chris Campbell’s house.

STUART: 

Down in South City, yeah.

DANA: 

Yeah, so I went there and I volunteered and it was a game changer for me, I got to tell you, cause um, I learned how to use power tools. Before that, I never touched a power tool in my life. I grew up on the beach. I played in the sand, in the water. My parents had to scream, “Get out of the water,” but I never ever used power tools. So they put a nail gun in my hand. They showed me how to use a chop saw, drills, and it was life-changing. It was super exciting and super fun, and I think it gave me the courage to, and the desire to, really go forward with making this camel. The cool thing about the camel is I used pallets, I used drop from the Man build, and I had nowhere to build this thing. I decided to build it in my very tiny teeny Victorian apartment in San Francisco. 

I cleared the living room and I found the pallets and the wood and here we go! And at first, I really didn’t think it was gonna turn out that great, but it started to look amazing. I got some help from a few of the builders on the Man crew and I just went for it. And I put wire mesh over it and I used what was readily available to me, flour and water and paper mache and fabrics.

And the camel, first attempt, the camel was looking so good, but it wouldn’t fit out the door frame. I got so excited that I just continued making it. And so I had to like, you know, downsize it a little bit, and it came out in pieces and parts, and it made it out that window. And luckily enough, it made it onto the truck. The other thing I did not have was transportation. So it made it onto a vehicle heading out to Burning Man that was in cohorts with the Man build. But the camel was very cool too when I got there because as I was setting it up there was a lot of artists that I met, and to this day they’re still my friends. They became my teachers and my mentors. I’m in touch with all the ones that are still alive, and still will work with these people. So that was another gift that happened while I was out there, is meeting this community of artists.

I met Larry Harvey as well while volunteering to help on the Man. He was dipping burlap into these big cauldrons of wax. And I didn’t know who he was, you know, but I sat there and I started cutting this burlap and dipping it into this massive cauldron. And here’s this guy just talking up a storm, you know. And he was definitely a dreamer. We started talking and it just led to a very absurd conversation, and entered a world of make believe, and I believe that that was a basis for our relationship over the years. We became very close, and he believed in me as an artist more so than I did. I was gonna be a scientist and he thought because I could make a camel I could make anything. He would have these fanciful ideas of things that he wanted built for Burning Man. He’s like, “Dana, can you build this?” I’m like “Oh yeah, sure, I could build that” you know. 

So one thing led to another, to another, to another, and a lot of the artists that I met through that camel, that same year, they took me under their wing. And whenever I was building anything, I used to go to one of them, this man, Pepe Ozan. He used to produce these beautiful operas and sculptures out there, very site-specific. He’s actually taught me how to weld, along with his other woman, Scottie Chapman. These artists took me under their wings and they definitely were there for me when I needed support, when I needed advice. I also work with a lot of them to this day. One is a San Francisco public artist, Brian Goggin, and I’ve worked with him on probably seven different installations here throughout the coast in California, and I went overseas with them. So that’s also a relationship that was fostered from that one silly experiment. And I’m going to call it an experiment, but the experiment got me out of the lab which I’m so happy and grateful for because I really don’t think I want to live my life in a lab doing the same thing over and over again. I know that it’s necessary for a lot of the scientific basis but I’m grateful that my life took this radical change. 

Definitely I’m not a self-taught artist. I just have continually grown and tried different things and been lucky and fortunate enough to have amazing mentors in my life and people in my life that truly believed in me.

STUART: 

I know you’re not the only person who learned how to weld, working with Pepe on his projects. And I’m sure you learned how important it is to keep your visor down. I remember my first…

DANA: 

Oh yes, oh absolutely!

STUART:

Pepe hated that visor, and I remember him spending a long time on a couch like half blind. So.

DANA: 

The most important thing I learned from Pepe, you know, keep that visor down. One of the other artists that was actually there, and he worked with Pepe a lot, is this guy named Morgan Raymond. He works on this gate project with me right now. And he’s an incredible metalworker and a blacksmith. And so there’s a lot of beautiful blacksmith elements in this portal that bring it up a notch. They’re exquisite. And so that was another friendship that I met. 

He also does not like to wear his visor, I want you to know. He had a few days out because he was seeing stars, so whatever you do, put the visor down! These old-school guys. Hmph. No need to suffer. Sight is a beautiful thing.

STUART: 

So you mentioned your relationship with Larry, and that actually rings true that he was very encouraging over a long period of time. I just wrote a little essay about him for the second edition of the Art on Fire book. Those are the stories that kept coming out; how much he believed in people when they weren’t really sure yet of what they were doing, right? And I know your relationship went on for a long time until you built a really beautiful and moving little memorial to Larry out on the playa after he passed away.

DANA: 

Yeah, he was a beautiful man, inside and out. I love Larry and that friendship developed stronger over the years. And he did believe. He believed so much in people and creativity and spontaneity, and that was his whole, you know, that was his, his true demeanor. And definitely without his encouragement, I don’t know if I would have continued. He pushed me beyond my boundaries to do things larger and different. And we used to talk. I know that you know, you and Larry have such a great rapport and friendship over the years as well, and that Larry loves to talk, you know, and Larry loves to dream. And I love that you now have taken over his place as the guy who writes the theme every year. It’s beautiful.

STUART: 

Okay. That part I’ll cop too.

You’ve always got at least one person to show up for your crew, right? To build? 

DANA: 

Oh yeah.

STUART: 

Actually, you have a great crew. I know some other people who come out and work on your projects, Pat Costello and some other friends. Are any of those, do you feel like you’re mentoring people, younger people who are coming up in art, or is it mostly just Tom Sawyer-ing people into whitewashing the fence with you?

DANA: 

No, it’s a combination of both. It’s really beautiful. Like, back to the portal and the gate, I had a friend, he was friends with this girl, Adele Bartlett, who’s on DPW, she’s in the sign crew. She’s a stained glass artist. I wanted to put glass into this gate entryway, and I made these turrets that are on top of the columns and they’re mosaic, but I also wanted some elements of glass within it that take more than, you know, I’m very accomplished at breaking glass, and I can cut glass in certain areas, but this woman, she works alone. Her whole, her young career, she’s worked alone and created some brilliant beautiful stained glass pieces, but she never worked on a piece with other people. Mind you, she’s been working in DPW for years. And so I had a phone conversation for her and after Resto she came down to the city and stayed for a month, and made such beautiful, beautiful, very precise cuts in glass that were additions into this whimsical gate. And it’s lovely to see their reflection in the light. And so that was a wonderful, unexpected joy. Now I’m excited for her, and she continues.

For volunteers, gosh, how do I get volunteers? A lot of times they’re friends, you know, and I just like Larry, reeling ‘em in, ya know! “I got this idea. I need help. Can you help me?” 

STUART: 

I thought so.

DANA: 

A lot of times it comes straight down to that, you know? I’ve been very fortunate. I’ve worked with Heather Metal. She’s helping me with the fabrication of the Bone Tree to make it twice as large, and she’s a badass, Burning Man, you know, and I’m very grateful to her. She’s smart and beautiful and really skilled. She also went to England with me. 

I got an opportunity to go to England and build this mermaid. I got to bring three people. But mind you, how Burning Man works, they weren’t ready for it, the English weren’t. I had lots of visitors while I was there. And we were staying above this Chatsworth Estate. We were down below the Duke and the Duchess were living. So we had definitely a constant roll of people coming through, which was really fun.

STUART: 

So wait a minute, did you just say you were downstairs? This was an Upstairs Downstairs episode with an actual Duke and Duchess upstairs?

DANA: 

Well, we were up, where we slept. We slept in the converted horse stables. So down below is this massive estate. It’s the Chatsworth House and it’s like, god, it’s a museum. It has tons of artwork, and the Duke and Duchess do live within this building. There’s like hidden rooms and hidden alleyways and doorways, and where they lived, where you couldn’t conceivably know that, because it’s open almost every day to the public, and they lead these tours. Meanwhile, the Duke and the Duchess are permanent residents in that, I would call it almost a castle. It’s a magnificent, huge mansion.

STUART: 

I think it qualifies as a castle when you’ve got that many rooms and what, a thousand acres of grounds?

DANA: 

Yeah, a thousand acres, it’s all stone, there’s turrets. There’s a lot of history. There’s the Lady in Waiting, and the son who’s gonna actually take the place, they’ll be the next Duke and Duchess. So they, you know, we got a kiln and we used broken glass there. And I wanted the kids to break it, but the British have rules, you know, “Don’t let kids break glass, god forbid.” So I had to break it myself. They collected a lot of glass bottles. And so we broke the glass and put it in a cement mixer and that softened the edges, similar to what beach glass does so it’s safe for kids to handle. So when I was there I worked with kids to help create a lot of the scales that were within this mermaid. It was a crazy fast build. We were there for six weeks. I built the armature here and that went to England and the rest of it was built on site.

STUART: 

Let’s talk about who these kids were. Were they like the Duke and Duchess’s children? 

DANA: 

Well, the Duke and the Duchess’s kids, they worked on it too.

STUART: 

Okay, cool. So it’s kids from the local school?

DANA: 

Yeah, these were kids from the local schools. They were from Derbyshire, and a lot of them would have never even have gotten a chance to go to Chatsworth. They come from small villages, and definitely on a lower income scale. So it was cool to work with these kids and bring them to a place they would never have an opportunity to go, and to engage them hands on in this larger creation, similar to what we do at Burning Man, it was just like that. 

There was a lot of involvement from the staff there. The sculpture was mixed metals and the things that I like, so I had to tell them what I liked, you know, and so people would donate or bring things and drop off bits and pieces of metal that I could use and assimilate into the mermaid. One of my favorite parts of it was an old stainless steel playground, and so from a slide in this playground area all that stainless steel was incorporated into her tail and it was very lovely. And the glass was collected a lot of blue from Sapphire gin which the kids couldn’t drink but we got to drink it!

We were low on bottles. We needed a few extra. All in the name of art. 

STUART: 

And you can’t fake that Bombay Sapphire Blue, it’s pretty distinctive, yeah.

DANA: 

Yeah.

STUART: 

Let’s talk about Coralee, I believe is the name of the piece, absolutely beautiful. And interesting, like, you know, so much of your stuff is site-specific. There’s something about a mermaid in the middle of the English countryside, pretty far from an ocean, that somehow still seemed to work. 

DANA: 

Well, there’s actually a few myths. One of the myths is it’s a landlocked mermaid, and she’s created definitely as if she were landlocked. She’s got roots for her hands, so they’re sort of digging into the earth. She’s part of the land, part of the sea. And so there’s a myth really close to Chatsworth probably it’s in Black Scout, there’s a pool of water where they say that a mermaid was landlocked, and only the pure of heart can actually see her, but you have to be pure of heart to actually visualize it and have that opportunity to be graced by this mermaid’s presence. 

STUART: 

It’s a beautiful, beautiful piece.

DANA: 

Yeah, it was so beautiful. It got to be near a pond on the Chatsworth Estate. It was the perfect setting. It was so super lovely and it was. Yeah, I wish it could have stayed there, but they have a rule they can only have temporary art just much like Black Rock Desert and the playa that they can only have temporary art on the estate. 

What was cool about it too with that exhibit was, it was called Radical Horizons and there was, I believe, 14 sculptures in the show, in this beautiful greenery. When we got there, there were little baby lambs that grew up to be sheep. We’d have to walk through a field of sheep to get to the work site. It was really, really a beautiful landscape. 

And these sculptures from Burning Man, most of them were already built and magnificent pieces. One was Pegasus. It returned this past year. That was placed by the horse stables where we were actually staying above Chatsworth house and it looked phenomenal. There was Flybrary, another piece of work by Christina Sporrong, just gorgeous, but there were several pieces. There was also the idea, Kim Cook, who orchestrated this show, wanted to have pieces that were actually built on site to bring the Burning Man ethos there, and so the local community could collaborate, as well as the kids getting them involved. And I love working with kids. It really is magic and fun for me. So I was asked to come and tarnish these kids. No, just a lot of fun with them. They were so well-behaved, I gotta tell you. Very proper, very English, very, very well-behaved and very fun to be around. They loved it. They got a chance to see all this exhibit and all these magnificent huge sculptures. They could tell their friends, “Hey, I helped build that,” you know? So it was a neat experience. 

STUART:

I know you love to work with kids. I’m thinking about a project that I really, really loved, is very fond in my heart still, is the Y.E.S. Project. Tell us a little bit about Y.E.S.

DANA: 

Y.E.S. stands for Youth Educational Spacecraft and it was a really fun project, so playful and phenomenal and so many different aspects. It was a partnership with Burning Man. There was a lot of crossover art at this time, and Maker Faire and the Exploratorium, these organizations came together, and the Crucible, they came together. They wanted to create something that as this sort of joint group. It would travel to Burning Man, it would travel to Makers Faire, it would travel to the Exploratorium, the kids can go to the Crucible and learn different skills, and so I was invited to make something, and that’s where the idea of the spaceship came from. 

It was a sort of 50s style spaceship. And I always thought of it as a fort. We’re gonna build a fort where kids can go inside of it. So there was a hatch that you opened and you can crawl inside. It probably fit 15 kids comfortably. And the kids helped. I worked with kids not only from the Burning Man community, but from the Boys and Girls Club in the Tenderloin. The Burning Man office was down there at that time, so we worked a lot in the Tenderloin, and then I worked in Bayview / Hunters Point, where my shop is, and with kids from there. And we made imaginary planets, and did a lot of mosaic work, all out of recycled material, all out of salvaged goods. So it was cool to teach these kids that, you know, you don’t have to have a lot of money, because a lot of them didn’t come from wealthy families in the specific areas where I was working, but that you can find anything on the street. So I use broken tail lights, broken headlamps, I mean, you name it, the gamut, and a lot of glass and a lot of recycled tile. 

But it was fun for these kids to see that they didn’t need to go to an art store and buy fancy brushes or fancy oils and fancy paper. You know, we made models all out of cardboard together and we started there and walked through the process of what it takes to create an art piece with drawings at first. And then we made these model spaceships, and the Maker Faire gave us some CNC cut out like designs as well that we could incorporate. 

And if the kids weren’t into the mosaic aspect of the spaceship, there was all these other elements. There was LED lighting. So if they gravitated more towards that and wanted to learn, all the wires were exposed. They were behind plastic, but when you went inside of the chamber of the spaceship, you could see all the wiring and it was done that way on purpose and pretty artfully as well. And I had a little tester kit so they could actually learn what you do to turn that light switch on, what you do to turn that fan on, you know, what electricity is all about. And so that was really fun. So kids gravitated toward that, or learning about light. 

We made a soundscape with them. So I had a person who works in sound work with the kids and we recorded a lot of their sayings. And kids are profound. They have a lot of really wise things to say. And a lot of it had to do with their interpretation of space. And they said the most profound, beautiful statements. One of my favorite ones was, one kid was talking about aliens. And when they got down to like the heart of it, they’re like, “You know, I think aliens are just a lot like us.” 

I had a woman who was 17 years old come and make a film with the kids. We had robotics inside. I worked with another friend that I met from that camel day, Kal Spelletich, part of this group Seemen. So I reeled Kal in, you know, since I made a paper mache camel, they needed a lot of props to blow up and so that’s where I got a lot of my experimental time in. 

STUART: 

Is that what happened to the camel? It was destroyed by a Seemen machine?

DANA: 

Well no the camel got burned; no, but what happened is that I started working with Kal, and it was great because he wanted a lot of paper mache things, this paper mache Pope that one of the machines could eat, these bombs, all these different things. I made a huge rat, massive, and they all became part of their show. So it was a really perfect, fun, working relationship and dynamic because, you know, here I just made this camel. I didn’t know what I was doing, and now I had this opportunity to make things that didn’t have to last, that were going to be crunched up, eaten, set on fire, you know, all the good stuff.

STUART: 

That is really interesting practice, making target props for shows of mass destruction. 

DANA: 

I love it.

STUART: 

Boy, I really do miss those shows.

DANA: 

Yeah, me too. So much fun. I love making those fast and furious things because you can’t, you don’t have a lot of time to double second guess yourself. You know, you just got to like plow through. And a lot of magic can happen that way. 

STUART: 

Kal’s gotten all respectable now. 

DANA: 

Yeah, I know, very respectable. 

STUART:

He’s a tweed artist now, working in fancy galleries and academia. We’ll get him on here one of these days to catch up. So yeah, back to Y.E.S.

DANA: 

I brought Kal in and he makes robots. And I thought, well, if we’re working with kids, and it’s the Exploratorium, it’s Burning Man, but I love that whole idea of intertwining science and art. So the kids that were interested in art would gravitate towards the art part. And the kids that were more interested in science, you know, to the robots. We had a lot of interactive parts within the spaceship and a lot of buttons that you can press and a lot of robotic arms and so forth. And so Kal would come and demonstrate to these kids and work with them. We went to Las Vegas on tour for a while with the spaceship. 

But it was like a little fort that you kind of hunkered down with the kids. And Flash was the best, like, you know, he would tell the kids, “We’re off to space. See you later, parents! We’ll be back in five years!”

But there was so many aspects and things to learn. It went from, you know, we’d have conversations about space. We’d have conversations about environmentalism, solar power, lighting, robotics. There was just, it was like the perfect little sort of melting pot for a profound amount of discourse,and different professions and people’s specialties. You know, like it was such an engaging, it was a mobile classroom basically. And in this mobile classroom, you know, the topics were endless. And it was very direct and very hands-on and the kids were so proud of it, you know, their involvement in it. That was, it was, it was a real joy. I want to make another one.

STUART: 

All right, look out kids, another spaceship coming along. Yeah, I remember there was one pretty magical moment. It came out to the playa the year that we built the giant flying saucer base for the Cargo Cult theme. And there’s a couple of just beautiful pictures of this little gorgeous jewel of a tiled mosaic spaceship in front of this gigantic wooden monstrosity. One destined to burn, the other not so much. Didn’t it end up as a conference room for a company in Las Vegas for a while?

DANA: 

It’s had quite the life. It did end up a conference room for Zappos shoes. It was brought by Tony Hsieh who was a beautiful man, who has since passed, but he revitalized the downtown area in Las Vegas and started this project called the Downtown Project. He brought a lot of art in, and a lot of educational aspects and was just an innovator and also similar to Larry in that he truly believed in people and their magic. He’d give cooks that worked really long, long late hours in the casinos, he gave them the opportunity to create their own restaurants, and work a normal kind of a better family hour job. He created a school. I went there and did some murals at the school, but a neat project. So the spaceship went there, but it ended up at Zappos as a conference room. 

But this past experience, it’s in Healdsburg, and the land where it’s at now, a few years back during COVID, there was some big fires that ravaged through Healdsburg and Calistoga. And so where the spaceship is placed, they made a clearing. So they cleared out all the trees and all the brush and all the area around it and this whole huge circular kind of like landing pad? And so when the fires came through, the trees and everything was burning around it, but it became a safe haven for all the animals. And so kind of like Noah’s Ark, it was like the animals went to the spaceship, you know, to survive the fire. There were a lot of wild donkey there, wild deer, and some captivating photos of that.

STUART: 

I always wonder, sculpture is one of those pursuits that if you’re not careful, you can end up with a lot of big things in your backyard, right? So that one ended up in, it went back to Healdsburg. Where have some of your other pieces ended up? Because once you stopped burning them or, you know, destroying them with fire machines, they gotta go somewhere, right?

DANA: 

Yeah. So that one is at Healdsburg. It’s on a beautiful ranch. They have events there and so forth. It has a beautiful life up on this hilltop and it survived the fires. 

Tara Mechani is in Reno. She traveled through San Jose. And then a very monumental moment in my life was, Tara Mechani got to be placed in San Francisco. When I first moved to San Francisco, I lived right up the street from Hayes Valley, where she was placed for a couple years. And at that time, I was studying science and didn’t think I’d be an artist, so I never thought in my wildest dreams that I would have a sculpture in the middle of this beautiful park, nor was there a park there. There used to be a freeway there, and it was a whole different kind of nitty gritty neighborhood than it is now, but , and it was a beautiful location and it was sort of a pivot, just a really special moment for me. 

I got evicted, I want you to know. I was definitely run out of town because my rent was so low, so I got one of those owner move-in evictions and I had to go, and I was so sad. This was the same little Victorian I built the camel in and I loved this place. So it was really sad to get thrown out and then be able to return to this neighborhood years and years later and be able to display a beautiful piece of art. So she’s now in Reno. I have another sculpture called Passage, and that one as well is in Reno.

STUART: 

in the sculpture park?

DANA: 

Yeah. Reno’s having a revitalization of art. It has for the past few years, but it’s really kind of a miraculous place. It’s beautiful.

STUART: 

How about the mammoth? Where’s the mammoth?

DANA: 

So the mammoth is great story. I got approached by this kid, 16 year old girl: Tahoe Mack. She had a dream, and her dream was to build this giant mammoth out of recycled metals. 

But mind you, she’s 16 years old and she wants, she’s a Girl Scout. She wants it to be her Girl Scout Golden Award. It’s like the last project you do when you’re a Girl Scout. How she got this idea was, she grew up in Las Vegas and there’s this area right outside of Las Vegas. It’s called Tool Springs. And now it’s a National State Park. But she went and heard these women speak and there were four or five women. They’re all in their late 60s, early 70s, and they would take a walk at night. And so they’re walking along and they start stumbling across all these mammoth tusks and bones, and they’re like “Oh my God. We gotta…” And this land, Vegas is spreading its tendrils, you know, it’s just been growing and growing and growing, so this land’s about to get developed. And the women go to the development like, “Hey, can you wait a minute? We’re stumbling across all these mammoth tusks and these bones,” and they go on and on, and the developer’s like “Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah.” And he kind of brushes off these ladies. Well, big mistake. They go back to the developer and like, “Hey, can you, maybe we can have like some of the paleontologists come in and do some digs before you continue developing.” And the developer says, “Um, don’t you ladies have something better to do?” And well, no, they didn’t. They had a great thing to do

What they ended up doing is taking that developer all the way to Washington, D.C. And they saved this land. They saved this land and it was sort of a dumping ground for trash, you know, but they saved the land, and then there were digs and the archaeologists came out and the schools worked there on the site and really honoring the mammoth. 

So the Girl Scout hears the story, and those women become her heroes. She decides she wants to build a giant mammoth at the head of this National State Park. She doesn’t know how to weld. She’s never built a large sculpture. She’s 16, she’s in high school. And I believe it was Marie Partridge from Reno, they’re like canvassing and trying to find out who could help this young teen build this mammoth. And they found a magnificent artist, one I still work with to this day, Luis Valero Rico, local artist in Vegas, and he made the interior structure of the mammoth, the skeletal structure. Very talented and a beautiful man to work with. And then somebody mentioned my name. They said, “Well, maybe you want to talk to this woman, Dana. She works in metal and she likes kids. She likes working with kids.”

So next thing you know, they get on a plane and they come out to San Francisco. She shows up and you can’t say no to a 16 year old, you just can’t. One who had had this beautiful dream, and it was really steeped in environmentalism and saving this land and creating this mammoth out of recycled metals and materials that were collected on that site, as well as other stuff that was donated and that I brought in. But I ended up moving to Vegas and working on this mammoth for I believe over six months with her. Lou worked with her, I worked with her, she was in school, so she would come on the weekends when she could. 

It was another experience of being thrown into a metal shop where they were fabricating the new stadium in Vegas. Meanwhile, we show up and we’re making this crazy mammoth. They just couldn’t understand what we were doing, but in the end they loved it so much, you know, it became definitely one of their favorite projects that they had in their workspace. 

It was a cool project, because it brought in a lot of community as well. A lot of these projects, bigger projects, they require a lot of volunteers to build. And the joy and building a lot of these projects is working with volunteers and working with people. It becomes a collective thing, bigger like the spaceship, you know. Working with all those different artists it became so much larger than I could have done on my own. And the same with the mammoth, it was just a phenomenal experience. 

The different walk of life that we had there. I had a lot of people from San Francisco come out and help on it. We had the ladies, those ladies, I had them grinding. Some of them had arthritis and they’re older. They’re sitting there all day long with their grinder and their cutoff wheel and they’re like, just going at it and just wonderful people. 

We had a Vietnam vet that came by. And we found a lot of discarded bullet shells, the site where the mammoth is, it used to be a shooting range, a legal shooting range. And so we went out with the Girl Scouts and collected a lot of these bullet casings. And so they line the tusks of the mammoth, similar in the fashion of elephant sort of tusks, but they, the bullet casings, they line that. And they’re also underneath the feet that the mammoth treads on, and they’re smashed and banged. Tahoe’s brothers created this crazy little design in there and so did this Vietnam vet. 

And one day I look over at him, and he’s this big guy with his long beard, and he’s just got tears streaming down his face. And I’m like, “Dan, what’s wrong?” And he says, “I never imagined that I would use bullet casings for something, to create something.” And he had been deep in the trenches and was a sniper. And never in his lifetime did he ever think that he would be able to make art out of something that, his familiarity was war. 

There were times I would see him, this Vietnam vet just sort of walking around, you know, doing stuff. And then we got Tahoe, the Girl Scout, who is really the genius behind this project and brought all these people together. We had a beautiful woman named Roxy, a transgender, phenomenal photographer who offered to photograph while we were working, and just these relationships across a lot of different people, and bonds started to build, that still once again, continue to this day. 

I was just out there right before Burning Man, I went out. It’s finally now at the head of this National State Park. Lou camped at our camp this year. Tahoe was there as well. I talk to her quite often. She just graduated from college and she’s turned out to be the most magnificent woman that I have had the pleasure to work with, and an honor to work with; very smart, very creative and just wonderful. So it definitely was just a phenomenal bond that grew out of that project.

STUART: 

I believe it was Larry Harvey who said, rather flippantly, but seriously, “Come for the art, stay for the community.” But, that is kind of a distinctive thing about Burning Man Art that is unique, I think, compared to other schools of art, movements of art, whatever, is that convening power, right? That ability to bring people together and let more people have their hands on it. 

DANA: 

Yeah.

STUART: 

I want to ask you kind of a brainy question here. Since you have been watching Burning Man Art evolve from the very earliest days until now. Where do you think it’s going? If it is in fact a movement, as some people say, Burning Man Art, all one phrase, where do you think that movement is headed? What does it look like in the future?

DANA: 

It’s phenomenal to see the art from the earlier days in Burning Man and how it’s developed and how it’s grown and how it’s definitely exceeded all expectations and possibilities. Because the type of art you see at Burning Man, you’re not gonna see anywhere else in the world. You will in some of these large sculpture parks, but the diversity of it and the interactive elements that often are part of this art make it so unique and special and profound and I hope that it continues and I do believe that it will. I just hope it goes further and farther and reaches more people. I think that it has, there’s a gift to offer the world for many people that don’t get to Burning Man. 

Going to England, we would go down to the pub and most people in this pub, they were they were from the country in England. None of them had been to Burning Man. A lot of them were older. I had like a guy with a cane walk up to me, “Oh young lady, please tell me about Burning Man, we’ve heard so much about it now.” They wouldn’t know all about it, but just the idea of Burning Man, and I know there’s lots of regionals and different events all over the world, but the beauty of that is that it’s that shared magic once again, and that shared creativity. And in the art realm, there’s such beautiful diversity in this art. It’s also stuff that you can interact with, climb on, touch. It has a beauty to it that museums often, you know, there’s a barrier, and Burning Man art is typically very inviting.

STUART: 

What about for Dana? What’s the future look like for you? You must be thinking about your next project already.

DANA: 

I am. It’s that time of year. I’m going to submit an L.O.I., Letter of Intent, to Burning Man. I have a mural. I try to do two murals a year. A lot of them are community-based, and they’re just very fun whimsical mosaic projects for me. But I really, I find it very grounding, and it’s fun to play. I like to switch up my mediums a lot, from bones to books to metal to glass to tile to you name it. So it’s fun for me, and it’s also just a splash of community and color and joy and a lot of that youth energy that I really enjoy. 

STUART: 

Okay, well, I want to thank you for being here. And just say that once again, I really appreciate your art and I’m really glad that you’re making it. And I look forward to see what happens next. Ladies and gentlemen, Dana Albany.

DANA: 

Thank you!

STUART: 

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