Image: Nevada Museum of Art, Reno
The Nevada Museum of Art in Reno will open ‘Sacred Transformations: The Art of David Best’ on October 24, 2026, bringing together career-spanning works, archival materials, and two newly commissioned installations by the San Francisco-born artist. The exhibition is scheduled to run through March 26, 2028 in the Newton and Louise Tarble Gallery, a two-story space that will house a soaring immersive shrine and temple.
According to the museum, the presentation surveys more than five decades of Best’s practice and focuses on the ways his art bridges oppositions: darkness and light, intuition and precision, and the abject and the spiritual. The show is designed to present Best’s work as both materially inventive and community-oriented, with the museum describing his art as building sanctuaries from what has been cast off and transforming the everyday into the extraordinary.
Best, born in 1945 in San Francisco, is widely recognized for his role in creating temples at Burning Man. The museum says he is the visionary behind nine of the event’s most iconic temples, and also notes that he has built ten temples in collaboration with communities across the globe. ‘Sacred Transformations: The Art of David Best’ will include a new shrine and temple concept developed for the Nevada Museum of Art, intended as a space for contemplation and reflection.
The exhibition statement emphasizes that the installation is not limited to the monumental new commissions. By uniting intimate studio works and archival materials with the larger shrine and temple, the show aims to trace the full arc of Best’s career. The museum’s framing places equal weight on the objects themselves and on the communal settings in which his work often takes shape.
The exhibition is also positioned within the museum’s broader 2026 fall programming. In an August newsletter, the museum described the show as one of two major autumn exhibitions and said it would offer a “rare illumination” of Best as an “iconoclastic Burning Man legend” who has shaped both objects and communities. That same communication paired the exhibition announcement with other museum programs and events, but the David Best exhibition remains the central fall opening.
A page for the exhibition lists major sponsors Eleanor and Robert Preger, with additional support from the Carol Franc Buck Foundation, Jan and David Hardie, Janet Levine-Rowen and Eric Rowen, Nancy and Rodney Nussbaum, Nancy and Harvey Fennell of Dickson Realty, Lurieland Foundation at CFNN, and Darby and David Walker. The museum’s exhibition page identifies the venue as the Newton and Louise Tarble Gallery at the Nevada Museum of Art, 160 West Liberty, Reno.
