Art From Burning Man Finds a Home in Aurora

The famous desert festival/communal freakout Burning Man is known for filling the Nevada desert with mind-blowing art — but not everyone is able to make the trek to Black Rock City to see it.

And now you don't have to: Hogan Park in the Aurora Highlands has brought a little slice of the legendary gathering's sculptures right into our backyard.

The park, which is free and open to the public, contains a wide range of works, including several that creatively stretch the definition of sculpture. But some pieces in particular stand out for the same reason they do at Burning Man: They're enormous.

Hunter Brown's "Life Blood," for example, weighs in at around 15,000 pounds, swirling gigantically above a roadway roundabout. The most recent addition to the park is Michael Benisty's massive "Broken but Together," a 25-foot sculpture of two shining steel figures in an embrace, towering over one end of the two miles of attractions.

Credit for this bounty of art goes to Aurora Highlands innovative developer and CEO Carla Ferreira. Since sculptures began being installed in July 2022, Ferreira has been expanding Hogan's ever-growing art walk with collections that have graced the Black Rock City playa, among other locations.

Ferreira wears several hats within the project and the community: She had been working as Aurora Highlands' director of on-site development before transitioning to CEO. Aurora Highlands, an LLC, also has its own metro district, of which she is a boardmember; it's also the entity that actually owns the art at Hogan Park, a project that was in the plans since 2017 and had its grand opening last June after a year of installing works.

With a mixed background in both the art and real estate worlds, Ferreira was taught to spin gold in real estate by her equally inventive father, a planner known in the Las Vegas area for making good use of local "cats and dogs" — the pieces of land that no one else wants. And that's exactly what Ferreira's done at Hogan, taking what is essentially a drainage ditch and transforming it into a community space full of incredible art.
"We decided to do something different in this development," she says, "not just do the cookie-cutter 'Hey, we were required to do something; let's just plop a statue over there and call it done.'"

Most municipalities stipulate that new development projects provide for public art in their plans, usually at around 1 percent of the budget. Ferreira's idea was a little more ambitious, though, taking inspiration from Washington, D.C.'s National Sculpture Garden and similar public installations.

"I really loved how the National Sculpture Garden was free, and that people that were tourists like myself were going. Also, people who worked in the area were taking their lunch and picnicking there," she recalls. "So I had this idea of having art in your backyard...a public art garden that you could go walk through at any time, that was accessible 24/7."

During the planning process, Ferreira was also working her way into the art scene at Burning Man. Over several years of attending the fest, she sought work to install at Hogan, beginning with that of contemporary light artist Olivia Steele, whose thoughtful series "Public Displays of Awareness" can be found throughout the park, asking spectators "If not now, when?" as well as "Si no ahora, cuando?"

Black Rock City's rigorous desert climate in many ways makes it the perfect place to search for Denver-appropriate work, developer-cum-curator Ferreira explains: "I figured if the art can survive the conditions at Burning Man, it can survive the conditions of Denver, Colorado."

Working on the Front Range, she took note of the increasingly harsh weather throughout the years. "Art needs to survive the heat, the [dryness], and then the change — how you could have hail in the middle of the day and then snow and then water," she notes. "I needed to install art that was going to be okay if there was a lot of water passing though there."

"Whatever resists at Burning Man will last forever anywhere else," confirms collaborator Benisty. A veteran Burner, he began attending the fest in 2014, which coincided with his first creations of arresting, large-scale sculpture. Fascinated by the reflective properties of polished steel and Burning Man's otherworldly landscape, he began to place pieces there in 2017. The desert, he explains, is "trying to kill you. ... It may break you as it may completely expand you. It usually does both." "Broken but Together" is the fourth in an ongoing series whose works all bear that title. In this iteration, the giant figures appear to have weathered a titanic storm, with huge chunks of their bodies seemingly broken or torn away — but they still stand tall, embracing with eyes locked.

"Most of it comes from a place of pain, and I don't like that word — 'darkness' — but it is there," Benisty says of his work. "It's energy. Pain is energy, darkness is energy. I've learned to transform it into light and beauty."

His work investigates "spirituality, humanity, connection, relationships, the things we struggle with the most," he adds. "I struggle as much as everybody else does, so I try to put it in a visual way where everybody can connect."

Now "Broken but Together" is adding to the beauty of an entirely different western landscape, sparkling and shining in the Colorado sun. When we visited, local familles were already flocking to its giant feet and congregating around it for selfies. Currently, it is the only permanent Benisty piece accessible to the public in North America. Most of his work is either temporary...or it "ends up in the backyards of very rich people," he admits.

Although it will continue to grow, eventually adding another full mile of art, Hogan Park is already becoming a destination and winning awards. It first started to really buzz online last summer with the installation of Daniel Popper's "Umi." The sculpture's merging of Gaia, or Mother Earth, with a tree-like structure has already begun to draw influencers and tourists from across the country and beyond. Its gentle curves are attractive to art lovers and children alike: Climbable and interactive, it's a sculpture you can literally be inside of.
Hogan also won the National Association of Home Builders Gold Award for Best Community Amenity this year, which is a first: The title usually goes to neighborhood features such as clubhouses instead of recognizing the slightly more intangible benefits of art enrichment. It's a welcome encouragement for Ferreira, who has faced stakeholder concerns about the project's practicality and negotiated for a collection of art that would typically be far beyond her budget.

Now she's looking to the future, crafting plans for an endowment and infrastructure that will hopefully preserve the park's beauty for generations to come. Among other ideas, she wants to create a gift store and event space for the community to both manage and benefit from.

"I want this to be self-sustaining," she says, and "I'm coming up with a way for it to be like that long after I'm around."

She explains that it's taking a bit of legal wrangling to figure out how that will actually work, because no one's ever really done anything quite like it before. But art-loving local residents can take heart, because that's exactly what she does best.
Hogan Park Art Walk at Highlands Creek is at 24495 East 35th Drive in Aurora.