Celestial Bodies

Your STR8-friendly adult bar in the Burning Man gayborhood and home of the Playa Cosmo.

Home

For 20 years, Celestial Bodies has participated in the Burning Man project. Our theme camp members cover a range of ages, occupations and life styles from San Francisco and the Bay Area, Florida, Sacramento, Reno, Tahoe, Sonoma Valley, Los Angeles, Hawaii and beyond. Our camp members volunteer, both on and off playa.

Our camp’s core goals and responsibilities are to experience, share, gift, participate and support the annual BMan project and its core principles to the fullest extent possible.

We are a relaxed, friendly, no-drama camp (for the most part) that has been together for more than a decade. We started out as a gay camp and have become more diverse camp over the years; therefore, we now lovingly refer to ourselves as a “straight-friendly” camp. And, while it wasn’t planned or ever imagined, Celestial Bodies has become a recognized theme camp and one of the anchor camps in the playa Gayborhood.

Stuart Mangrum
Michael Garlington is a photographer, master printer and sculptor. He is the son of a journalist and a photographer. Raised in Petaluma, California, he was influenced early on by the mix of hippies, poultry and dairy farmers, metal fabricators, bleeding hearts, artists and transients surrounding him. At 17, he began working with his mother and step father at their photographic lab in San Francisco, Spindler Photographic. Working at Spindler Photographic was a turning point in Michael’s life. He gained and mastered his skills at black and white film development and printing. The best photographers in the Bay Area at the time were clientele of Spindle Photographic and this exposure informed his composition and developed his dark room talent. By age 21, Garlington embarked on his own artistic mission, photographing the world around him, but more interestingly creating new worlds for his portraits to exist in. By building backdrops and sculptural elements to photograph he created what he calls photosculptures. His work captures luminous, yet often stark imagery encompassing the spectrum of human emotion and experience. The question became what to do with all these images. In 2000, at the age of 23, Garlington embarked on PhotoCar across the US and Europe. He and artists of various backgrounds traveled in a car covered with his photos. The car initiated interactions with those they encountered along the way. On his trips across the US he thrives on capturing his version of the Americana. Since 2004, Garlington has been featured in PhotoNY, PhotoLA, and PhotoSF. In 2005 a collection of his portraiture was published under the title, “Portraits from the Belly of the Whale.” He has been exhibited in solo and group shows around the world. In 2009, his work was the target of an art heist in Connecticut. More recently, Garlington has been sought out for his installations. Similar to the sculptures he creates for his photos, Garlington has moved towards creating longer lasting sculptures and art installations which can be experienced by viewers. In 2010, Garlington was sponsored by the National Endowment of the Arts and the Andy Warhol Visual Arts Foundation to create, “PHOTOHOUSE” for SF Camerawork. For Burning Man, Michael Garlington has been selected as part of their Honorarium Collection three times. The first was in 2012 with a 20’ x 60’ x 4’ sculpture spelling out the word EGO. Each letter was comprised of intricately assembled hand poured plaster relics. In 2013, Garlington designed and built PhotoChapel, a gothic style chapel covered with black and white portraiture. The intricately gilded interior had plaster elements utilized in EGO, as well as an altar, confessional, and catacombs. PhotoChapel was 8 feet wide by twenty feet long and had a forty foot tall steeple. In 2014, Garlington brought Totem of Confessions to Burning Man. It is his largest project to date, with a thirty foot by thirty foot base and towering sixty feet overhead. The exterior was covered once again with Garlington’s portraiture, with animals, succulents, flowers, and shells surrounding photos making each cell a miniature diorama. Within the Totem, there was a gilded confessional, colored murals reaching to the peak of a stained glass steeple bathing the interior with lush colored light. All sculptures created for Burning Man were burned in spectacular fiery deaths, yet live on in the many photos and memories of those who were there to experience them. Looking towards the future, Garlington is collaborating with partner Natalia Bertotti. They have been working on projects together since 2013. Both inspire, learn and grow from each other’s talents making art and in their adventures together. Their ambitions are set on creating permanent installations. Incorporating photography into the sculptures is a consistent theme. It becomes the most elaborate frame a photo could hope for. The detail and multiples levels within their work is their staple. The frame is a sculpture housing the photo-sculptural portrait laced with emotion that lies within the subject. With so many details to discover the viewer can see the same image or sculpture so many times and yet consistently uncover something new. The next stage is towards permanent installations. Garlington and Bertotti have completed their first, a ceramic fountain at a private residence in their hometown of Petaluma. Currently they are working on museum installations as part of groups shows showcasing the Art of Burning Man. The first is at the Hermitage Museum and Gardens in Norfolk and they are in talks with the Renwick Gallery in Washington, DC for an installation in early 2018. They also look forward to returning to Burning Man with a large scale installation, The Chapel of Babel, yet the installation date is still to be determined.

Rachel Hundley

Rachel Hundley “retired” from a career as a corporate litigation attorney in New York City to move to California and open a fried chicken business. The goal was to put down roots in smaller city where she could be more involved in the community, and a year later Rachel found herself buying a food truck and running for the Sonoma City Council. She surprised everyone, including herself, when she won that election and became Sonoma’s first elected millennial.

Rachel served as the Mayor of Sonoma in 2017 when unprecedented wildfires swept across the North Bay. Her growing passion for local government inspired her to close her five-year-old fried chicken business, reinvent herself as a public law attorney specializing in municipalities and special districts, and run for a second term on the city council in 2018.

Rachel’s reelection campaign took an unexpected turn when she received an anonymous email stating she should reconsider her second run or else she would be “exposed.” The email included a link to a new website about her. Although this was not Rachel’s first run-in with a malicious website, this one added a new angle. Using photos of Rachel from Burning Man, the website stated she was too “immoral” and “unethical” to continue leading the city. Rachel’s response—a four-minute video posted to YouTube entitled “Sonoma Councilwoman Says No to Slut-Shaming”—went viral, and her story was reported across the country and around the world in national and international news media. Rachel won her reelection with the most votes in the history of that race. She currently serves as Vice Mayor.

Rachel is a native of the Deep South where she earned three undergraduate degrees from the University of Georgia and a law degree from the University of North Carolina. She currently services as General Counsel to four special districts in the Bay Area. Rachel also serves on a number of boards, including serving as chair of the Sonoma County Mayors & Council Members Legislative Committee. In her free time, Rachel paints birds and portraits of her two pets, Dr. Frasier Crane (kitten) and Sam Seaborn (dog). She is married to Sean Hamlin, who proposed during public comment at a City Council meeting in 2017.

Nino Alicea

Puerto Rican artist NiNo was introduced to the world of arts at an early age when his parents noticed how much he enjoyed drawing and painting. When he attended college at the University of Puerto Rico, he joined the National Student Exchange Program which transferred him to Indiana University where he majored in Graphic Design.

NiNo’s experience as an artist has since been very eclectic. It has brought him to designing sets and shows for stage, film, and commercials in Los Angeles. He was part of the design team for NBC’s TV show “American Dream Builders” and has been working as the Art Director/Prop Master for Ricky Martin since 2017.

NiNo’s favorite projects have been creations that bring communities together, notably the public art project, “Múcaro’s Rising”, a basketball court mural located in Puerto Rico. It was the first of its kind on the island sponsored by the 2K Foundation. The project also served as an outreach program to involve the community to paint and refurbish the court, an experience NiNo was proud to lead. Múcaro’s Rising was recognized with a CODAward as one of the 2021 Top 100 commissioned art installations in the world.

Other public art projects NiNo designed and created are “Got Framed”, a popular interactive art installation at Burning Man (2015 & 2016), recognizing him as the first Puerto Rican to bring art to Burning Man, and the wise woody owl named “MÚCARO” which received the 2017 Burning Man Honoraria Art Grant. He recently received his second Honoraria Art Grant to bring a new interactive art piece “ATABEY” to the 2022 event.

NiNo owes a lot of his big art fabrication and installation experience to his years working at one of the best U.S. art fabrication houses, Carlson Baker Arts. He has had the opportunity to collaborate with renowned artists such as Christian Moeller (“Cactus” at the Henry B. González Convention Center, San Antonio Texas) and Pae White (“Woven Walk” at the LAX, Los Angeles Tom Bradley International Airport).

In 2021 he joined forces with his talented friend Thomas Dambo, fabricating five of his world-renowned troll installations at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay, Maine called in “Guardians Of The Seeds”.

What fulfills NiNo the most is creating spaces that provoke thought and conversation. He loves seeing people being stimulated, and better yet, inspired to create, thrive and dream BIG.