Art From Burning Man Finds a Home in Aurora
Developer Carla Ferreira has filled Hogan Park with incredible sculptures, including work from the Burning Man Festival and beyond.
The famous 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 some of the legendary gathering’s sculptures right into our backyard, and the collection is growing.
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. Then there’s Belgian artist 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. Another giant Benisty sculpture, “Liberty,” just joined the lineup; it took two cranes to place the 58-foot-high, 37,000-pound piece that was at the 2024 Burning Man.
Credit for this bounty of art goes to Aurora Highlands innovative developer and CEO Carla Ferreira. Since sculptures were first 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 had been 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 drainge ditch and transforming it into a community space full of incredible art.
