Big Hair Dave has a really big crane.
The 7.5-ton steel beast lurches through the sprawling raw square footage of Building 64 of the Navy Yard. David Brisacher, the follicly-endowed producer of the Kulture Klash also known as Big Hair Dave, is ready to deploy it to realize some seriously outsized art statements.
“We got it outfitted, so we’re utilizing that for this really cool massive Shepard Fairey piece,” he said in a recent interview.
On Nov. 22, Kulture Klash, the one-day arts festival known for pushing creative and physical bounds, will mount another height. It will reach the double digits with its 10th installment. The milestone promises to be an aesthetic whopper, too, gathering more than 100 visual artists and 20 high-flying musical acts and performance arts, along with pulse-quickening light shows and a crowd surging to as many as 5,000, who are as wide-ranging as the art is.
“Kulture Klash is a very unique mixture, combining all of the arts together, and in a really cool counterculture way where you have all sorts of visual artists, graffiti and every genre of musical artists, dance performances–like a full cultural explosion,” Brisacher said.
This year might be the most audacious since it let loose in the early 2000s. The brainchild of Scott Debus and Gustavo Serrano, they introduced the formula — a mashup of events all the rage in New York City and Miami. Then they brought on Brisacher, a member of the Charleston reggae band The Dubplates.
“We performed, and I also was the production provider, with all the crazy sound and lights and lasers and fun things like that in the early days,” said Brisacher, whose efforts spin out from his company Big Hair Productions.
After the past loss of a venue, the festival in recent years has focused mainly on pop-ups while finding a new partner. Last year after landing a dream locale in Building 64 of the Navy Yard, the festival came back in full force.
“They were an amazing partner to let me run with turning the space into a really cool state-of- the-art event and concert venue,” said Brisacher, who has also produced events there such as Skinful Halloween.
With its vast terrain encompassing 38,000 square feet, Building 64 represents a rare creative canvas of its size for a Charleston arts festival. And it makes a big difference, he said, affording artists creative freedom to showcase their talents.
Those in the visual arts lineup often create works as big as 20-by-20 feet or some similarly towering art piece. Performance artists like Out On A Limb have made use of that massive crane in their feats of aerial artistry. Unbound Ballet, the contemporary ballet company that often performs site-specific works of choreography, tackles the raw space in its own incentive ways.
Brisacher attributes scoring the ideal setting to the commitment of Navy Yard Charleston, a joint venture partnership with Jamestown, WECCO Development and Weaver Capital. It is developing the 79-acre mixed-use neighborhood near Park Circle to include 3.2 million square feet of office retail, restaurant and residential space — and envisions Building 64 as its cultural center.
The festival is permitted to paint murals on the walls, adding more with every installment and turning the space into a work of art itself. With those in place, artists are inspired to go bigger and bolder every year.
“I don’t think there could be a group that’s more heavily invested in the cultural arts community, in making sure that it’s affordable for artists to be able to actually live and work and create in this area and to give so many opportunities to nonprofit organizations,” Brisacher said, adding props to the city of North Charleston, too.
All of this includes use of the crane, which this year is operative in an installation conceived by Shepard Fairey, arguably Charleston’s most celebrated homegrown artist provocateur.
“His art always has such a powerful message behind it, too,” Brisacher said of the work, which will be shown alongside a robust roster of visual artists of every style and subject matter.
Like the murals, the level of talent keeps topping itself. The 2025 musical lineup features celebrated artist DJ Z-Trip, who, as chance would have it, has in that past had his culture clash of sorts with Fairey, by way of an art and music mix tape called Vision and Sound.
Then there’s a performer just about everybody will know: Darryl McDaniels, aka DMC, of Run-DMC.
“To see Kulture Klash post on Run-DMC’s page is mind blowing,” said the artist. But his mind primed for such high-flying moments, big hair notwithstanding.
IF YOU WANT TO GO: Kulture Klash is 6 p.m. to 2 a.m., Nov. 22 at Building 64, Navy Yard, 2301 Noisette Blvd., North Charleston. Tickets are $35 to $100. More: kultureklashchs.com
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