Location: Petaluma, CA
Medium: Sculpture, installation, public art
David Best was born in California in 1945. He began taking art classes at the San Francisco Art Institute at age six, later attended the College of Marin, and served in the U.S. Army before returning to the San Francisco Art Institute in the mid-1970s to study painting, ceramics, and sculpture, ultimately earning a master’s degree in sculpture there.
Best first built a name for himself outside the gallery system, customizing and decorating dozens of art cars and designing Houston’s Art Car Museum. Since 2000 he has designed and coordinated construction of roughly half of the temples built for Burning Man in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, including the Temple of Mind (2000), Temple of Tears (2001), Temple of Joy (2002), Temple of Honor (2003), Temple of Stars (2004), Temple of Forgiveness (2007), Temple of Juno (2012), and Temple of Grace (2014) — massive, intricately carved wooden structures that are ceremonially burned at the close of the event.
Since 2005 Best has extended the temple form beyond Burning Man to public sites around the world, building memorial temples in San Francisco, Detroit, Ireland, Nepal, England, and Texas, in addition to a permanent steel temple in his home county of Sonoma. He lives and works in Petaluma with his wife, Maggie.
Best builds at monumental architectural scale, working with salvaged and reclaimed wood alongside teams of volunteers — often more than a hundred people over several weeks — organized as his “Temple Crew.” He describes his process as largely intuitive, “90 percent intuitive and 10 percent planned in advance,” prioritizing emotional access over craftsmanship: the goal is for visitors to inscribe grief, memory, and loss onto the structure itself.
His temples function as non-denominational sacred spaces where communities leave messages, photographs, and mementos for the dead, and nearly all of them are ceremonially burned at the end of their installation — a deliberate act of catharsis that leaves no physical trace. The exception is his 2014 Temple of Remembrance at Paradise Ridge Winery in Santa Rosa, a 25-ton welded steel structure and his first permanent work, which survived the 2017 Tubbs Fire unscathed.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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