The Founder of Burning Man Is Coming Home to Portland

Larry Harvey will be at the closing of his brother's A Burning Man Pas de Deux exhibit on Saturday

Burning Man is one of those things you either get or you don't. Running around in the desert alongside 70,000 dust-caked, glitter-spangled, junk-dangling, drugged-out E.D.M. freaks is not everybody's idea of bliss.

Larry Harvey - photo from Burning Man Larry Harvey – photo from Burning Man

But if you're one of the converted, take note: Burning Man's biggest celebrity is coming to Portland this weekend, and if you're a star-fucker (or at least an aspiring groupie), you'll want to meet him.

Larry Harvey co-founded the festival in 1986 and has been its public face ever since. His brother, photographer Stewart Harvey, chronicled 25 of the 29 iterations of Burning Man and those photos are showing at Mark Woolley's gallery in Pioneer Place Mall, joined by shots from a Parisian photographer known as MARTI, who has work at the Louvre.

Photo from MARTI Photo from MARTI

To celebrate the exhibition, Larry Harvey is coming to the closing party of his brother's show. This is a rare public appearance for the normally reserved figure.

Both Harvey brothers were raised in the Parkrose neighborhood of Portland, so Portland is in Burning Man's blood. And the Oregon contingent of Burning Man attendees ("Burners," yo?) is legion. No doubt they'll be out in full force this Saturday—clad in faux fur, feather boas and body paint. Maybe thongs, maybe nothing at all. "Épater le bourgeoisie," people—this is the mall, after all. Just don't expect Larry Harvey to get too crazy.

Photo by Patrick Harvey, from the Mark Woolley Gallery Photo by Patrick Harvey, from the Mark Woolley Gallery

Although he's known for his trademark wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses, and kind of looks like Hunter S. Thompson, Harvey's more buttoned-down than you'd expect from the instigator of the world's biggest bacchanal. You'd have to be a serious kind of guy to have parsed infrastructural minutiae with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management for three decades—and to have the buck stop with you as the mayor of a de-facto city in which thousands of people are tripping balls in 100-degree heat.

Larry Harvey is a cool cucumber. He keeps it together. And regardless of whether Burning Man is for you, you have to hand it to him—he's created a major cultural phenomenon that shows no signs of stopping.

GO: A Burning Man Pas de Deux closing party is at the Mark Woolley Gallery, 700 SW 5th Ave., top floor of Pioneer Place Mall. 5 pm-9 pm, Saturday, Nov 14. Free.

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