Facing the Fear Beast

Facing the Fear Beast
36’ long steel and tire sculpture, mixed media, collaborative build

Some artworks soothe. This one confronts. Looming thirty-six feet long, Facing the Fear Beast is raw, unsettling, and unforgettable. It doesn’t aim for beauty—it aims for truth.

Born as a Burning Man honorarium project, the Beast was conceived by artist Tigre Michelle-Lively, brought into form with structural design by Cali Beck of Stark Raven Fabrication in Santa Fe, and scaled into reality through the efforts of a dedicated crew of welders, riggers, and builders. Its skin is made of motorcycle tires, cut into jagged scales on a water-jet cutter and painstakingly attached, giving the creature a dark, armored presence. Its form is at once mythical and monstrous—a nightmare given steel and rubber flesh.

The Beast is more than spectacle: it is metaphor. As Beck explains, Facing the Fear Beast is about confronting the wounds of our childhood—the raw places where fear takes root and festers. Standing before it, you’re invited not just to see a monster, but to recognize the shadows within yourself.

The process of building the Beast was as charged as its presence. The team worked under dangerous conditions, balancing colossal legs, welding bent tubes into place, hoisting sections with cranes while volunteers stood inside and beneath the structure. The danger was real; so were the emotions. Some collaborators loved the project, others loathed it, and its journey was marked by controversy. For some, it became a vessel for grief—Tigre Michelle-Lively, the originator of the vision, passed away during the years of its making, leaving the Beast with a legacy as heavy as its steel.

At Art City, the Beast brings something rare: the acknowledgment that not all art is meant to be comfortable. Its hulking form challenges the desert landscape with a dynamism that forces reflection. It pulls you toward the uncomfortable truth that fear itself—ugly, dangerous, uninvited—is worth facing.

Here, among sculptures that glow, soar, and invite play, the Beast stands as a counterweight: a reminder that art doesn’t have to be pretty to be necessary.