Wildfire destroyed a historically Black town. These artists won't let its legacy disappear

The Guardian

2 days ago

On the walls of the gallery, Keni 'Arts' Davis's watercolors show Altadena before and after the fires. There is a local hardware store, a beloved diner, the quirky local Bunny Museum, which held tens of thousands of rabbit-related items.
Then, in gentle strokes of paint, there is the wreckage of each place: rubble, charred beams, burnt-out cars. Davis labels each of these images 'BFA', beauty from ashes.
Those post-fire ruins are gone now, too: Altadena, a historic Black community in Los Angeles that lost nearly 10,000 structures, including more than 6,000 homes, in January's Eaton fire, is slowly being prepared for rebuilding.
'Now all the rubble is gone, and it's just flattened out,' said Dominique Clayton, the curator of Ode to 'Dena: Black Artistic Legacies of Altadena, a long-running exhibit at the California African American Museum. 'I'm so glad he painted the before and after. Now those buildings have been demolished.'
Ode to 'Dena aims to capture the rich creative legacy of Altadena, a community that for decades nourished Black artists, performers, writers and activists, from Eldridge Cleaver and Sidney Poitier to Octavia Butler. The small town, nestled in the hills to the north of Los Angeles, offered Black families an early chance at homeownership in a region long defined by racial segregation and redlining.
When neighborhoods that had offered Black families a chance to build generational wealth were reduced to ash in January's historic wildfires, it was a trauma that resonated far beyond the city.
Locals immediately feared that the gentrification of Altadena would be accelerated by the destruction, and that the pre-fire community would be pushed out, longtime Black residents scattered, while the town was rebuilt for wealthier newcomers.
But Altadena's close-knit community immediately rallied to prevent this double destruction, drawing on a wide range of allies and supporters. While Donald Trump chose not to visit fire survivors in Altadena, limiting his presidential tour to the destruction in the wealthier Pacific Palisades, organizations like the NAACP and BET Media raised funds, and multiple arts institutions, including Frieze LA, stepped up to document the effects of the fires and highlight the work of artists who had lost their homes and studios.
The California African American Museum exhibit, which runs through October, is part of this broader effort. The show highlights not only the multiple generations of prominent Black visual artists with connections to Altadena, but also the deep connections among them. Several of the artists have multiple generations of their family in the show, including textile, performance and portraiture artist Kenturah Davis, whose father's watercolors and mother Mildred 'Peggy' Davis's quilt work are both included. The oldest artist on display, the assemblage artist and printmaker Betye Saar, is 98 years old. The youngest, Kenturah Davis's son Micah Zuri, is two years old.
While many of the artists in the show, including Charles White, Kenturah Davis, Martine Syms, American Artist, and Saar and her daughter Alison Saar, are already well-known in the art world, others are just beginning to enter the industry, or have little connection to traditional galleries and museums.
When she was assembling the show, Clayton said, 'every single one of the artists that I talked to, would talk about three or four other people that I'd never even heard of. That's how closely connected that they are, and how concerned and familial they are.'
'In the African American community, even in our loss, we're looking out for each other,' she added.
Altadena resident Capt James Stovall V, for instance, is a 'brand-new emerging artist', Clayton said, whom Kenturah Davis met at an artists' residency in New Haven, Connecticut.
Before she worked on the exhibit, Clayton had not been familiar with the work of La Monte Westmoreland, an older Altadena artist and longtime friend of artists John Outterbridge, the former director of the Watts Tower Art Center, and White, a nationally prominent African American artist.
'Now I see his work, I'm obsessed with it, and I see how much it's inspired by the work of his peers,' she said. 'They were all close friends and spent so much time together.'
Another artist on display, Liz Crimzon, is a graphic designer at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Lab. Hiking in the Angeles national forest was a crucial part of daily life for many residents: January's wildfire started in Eaton Canyon, which had a popular hiking trail. Crimzon's nature photographs documented details of that landscape, which was also destroyed by the fire.
Clayton said it was crucial to her that the Altadena exhibit include Black artists who were not yet famous or commercially successful.
'The Eaton fire didn't only affect the most celebrated artists – it affected everybody,' she said. More established artists were likely to have 'the means and resources to start over'.
'A lot of other artists don't have gallery representation. They don't have families with extra room to store all of their stuff. Those are the people I worry about.'
When she was putting the exhibit together in early spring, Clayton said, many of the Altadena artists whose homes were standing after the fires were still living elsewhere. In the immediate aftermath of the devastation, gas lines and water lines had been shut off in parts of the community. A lot of artists 'were staying in other places'.
Now, six months after the blaze, more people have returned to their homes, or to the land where their homes once stood, and are assessing how to continue. How safe the post-burn areas are is an unresolved question. 'Everyone is concerned about the air quality, the soil, the water,' Clayton said.
But Altadena's creative community has also seen new growth after the fires: artists like Westmoreland have held solo shows of their remaining work, Clayton said.
Old connections have also been strengthened. Betye Saar, now a prominent artist, had designed album covers for jazz musician Bennie Maupin in the 1970s. Maupin, who lost his home and instruments in the Altadena fire, reunited with Saar at the exhibition's first weekend, and they 'had a little jazz concert', Clayton said. Maupin started playing a flute he had been gifted after the fire, 'and Betye kicked her walker to the side and started dancing. …
'Fifty-something years later, to be in front of the same album, dancing and playing – it was like no time had passed.'
'Culture, especially minority culture, is at risk for erasure and loss,' Clayton said. 'We have to double down with cultural preservation.'