Burning Man are partly sponsored by the Burning Man Project. Burning Man Burning Man is an annual event in the western United States at Black Rock City – a temporary city erected in the Black Rock Desert of northwest Nevada, approximately north-northeast of Reno. The late summer event is described as an experiment in community and art, influenced by ten main principles: radical inclusion, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, gifting, decommodification, participation, immediacy and leave no trace. The event takes its name from its culmination, the symbolic ritual burning of a large wooden effigy ("The Man") that traditionally occurs
Burning Man was capped at 50,000 participants and the event sold out on July 24; the attendance rose to 70,000 in 2015. The Burning Man Project endorses several smaller regional events, inspired by the Burning Man principles both in the United States and internationally. Burning Man began as a bonfire ritual on the summer solstice in 1986 when Larry Harvey, Jerry James and a few friends met on Baker Beach in San Francisco and burned an tall wooden man as well as a smaller wooden dog. Harvey has described his inspiration for burning these effigies as a spontaneous act of "radical self-expression".