Their studios burned. Their art was destroyed. A new exhibit of the remaining works of 100 LA artists devastated by fire

The Guardian

18-02-2025

When Jeffrey Sugishita visited the burned-down husk of the house where he has been living, flames were still smouldering inside. For about 30 minutes, Sugishita wandered the wreckage, looking at the empty space where his room had been.
'What's burnt is burnt,' the 26-year-old artist said. 'I told myself: 'I'm going to make something new out of this.''
Sugishita went to his car, took out the helmet sculptures he had saved from the blaze, and started photographing himself, using only his iPhone and a tripod.
One of those self-portraits – Sugishita, standing amidst the charred ruins, wearing a helmet of flowers – is now at the center of a Los Angeles art exhibit that opened Friday, which brings together the work of nearly 100 artists who lost their homes, studios and life's work to January's historic wildfires.
Highlighting the ongoing toll of California's extreme weather, the show for artists displaced by wildfire opened as the gallery was being flooded by torrential rains. Water seeped across the gallery floor, and workers swept puddles out the door as new emergency alerts had been issued, highlighting the risk of mudslides in recently-burned areas across Los Angeles.
Some of the artists who contributed to the new show are well-known, such as Ruby Neri, Kelly Akashi and Kathryn Andrews, or even, like Paul McCarthy, famous in the art world for decades. Others have mostly exhibited their work locally, or are just beginning their careers, like Sugishita, who graduated from art school in 2023.
'It felt really necessary to create a context where people who have been displaced could converge together, in an exhibit that could be as far-reaching and inclusive as possible,' said Aram Moshayedi, who serves as the interim chief curator of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, but who put together the show independently, as part of an all-volunteer effort.
A hundred percent of any sales will go to the artists, he said, inspiring the show's name: One Hundred Percent.'
The thread of the exhibit is the artists' common and very recent devastation. Some of the works exhibited are ones the artists threw in their cars as they fled the fast-moving flames.
One Altadena artist gently touched the chipped frame of her photo collage of a contemplative woman, which had been damaged in her escape from the Eaton Canyon fire.
For the past month, 'all of my art has been in my van and in Airbnbs,' said Calethia DeConto, 44, whose Altadena rental is still standing, but so damaged by smoke and soot that she cannot return.
Daniel Mendel-Black displayed a digital print of a painting that he had just finished in early January, and that had been incinerated in the Eaton fire. The original painting had been inspired by themes of social fragmentation and dystopia, he said, and it was strange to try to reconstruct it. 'A lot of things I could talk about conceptually, are now completely emotionally actualized,' he said.
Some artists showed works salvaged from the ashes of their homes, like Ronna Ballister's row of slightly charred ceramic pots, which the 73-year-old found by digging through the rubble of her Altadena home.
For others, their only option was creating something entirely new. Howard Goldberg lost almost everything he had made to the Altadena fire, '30 years of art turned to ash'.
Without a home, studio or materials, moving from place to place, Goldberg made new work using recent copies of the Los Angeles Times, a throwback to a technique he has used before. It felt appropriate, he said: 'My own personal catastrophe is on the front page.' He rearranged the letters of the paper's name into different daily messages, Among Less EliTes, me see LosT signAl, as if the newspaper itself was speaking, or even 'blabbering', like 'an idiot that has to keep talking … has to find the story'.
Displaying their work in a group show with other artists who had suffered wildfire losses inspired complicated feelings, the artists said: hope that community could be restored by coming together, but also layers of grief and anger.
'Behind every single one of these pieces is a whole history that is gone,' said Lou Dillon, 38, whose mother's home in Malibu, where their family had lived for 70 years, had been reduced to charred stones. Dillon and her mother, Victoria Franklin-Dillon, 73, displayed their two works of art side-by-side: the mother's drawing of a view from her Malibu home, and the daughter's 2015 painting of that hill on fire during a previous Malibu blaze.
'This was a climate change disaster and all of us are responsible for it,' said Camilla Taylor, whose Altadena home was destroyed. 'We are addicted to convenience, and there is a cost to that convenience.'
The heat of the fire that burned their house was so great that 'the windows didn't break, they slumped–they melted,' they said. 'I had a collection of marbles. They are now a single mass.'
Taylor contributed a sculpture of a blackened figure with a metallic mask that had been stored in a gallery, and thus survived. Though Taylor had made the figure before the fire, it now reminded them of what it was like picking through the charcoal of their destroyed home, and seeing an occasional rivulet of metal.
'It's going to come for all of us,' they said. 'We have to do better.'
Many of the artists in the show had stories of dramatic escapes. Vincent Robbins, 87, said he had been trying to put one of his large paintings into his truck as he evacuated from the Eaton fire, but the 100mph winds picked up the canvas, and him with it. He ended up sprawled on the driveway, with broken ribs and a damaged tooth. The painting had to be abandoned, and was burned along with his home. He 'used to live' in Altadena, Robbins said, now 'it's all powder.'
For the show, Robbins, who has been living with his wife in a Fema-funded motel, had made a new abstract sculpture, decorating it in part with ash he had gathered from what was left of his home, as well as with some tubes of paint brought along by accident as he evacuated. He called it: Uncertainty.
Almadeus Star, 82, described being on the roof of his Altadena house, trying to save it from a tree felled by the heavy winds, when the power went out. In the darkness, he decided to evacuate and grabbed what he could, including a single precious art work, a container holding an old piece of cloth with spiritual significance that he calls Shroud of Altadena. It was, he explained, 'something I could hold in my hand'. He put Shroud of Altadena on display in the gallery, alongside a smoke-smudged glass vessel that survived the blaze.
Other artists said the show itself had encouraged them to make new work, despite the many logistical hurdles of life in the wake of disaster.
Right before the fire, Mary Anna Pomonis had just put what she thought was her best work on display at Altadena's Alto Beta gallery. Then the gallery, and everything in it, burned. For a while, Pomonis said, she worried that she might not be able to work again:'To lose it all gave me a fear that I couldn't come back from it.' But she worked through the fear, and was displaying a digital copy of one of her lost artworks, coupled with brand-new work.
Kassia Rico-Yeh, 32, said she had been to the emergency room twice in the past month, dealing with the overlap of asthma, smoke, and Covid. But she had finally managed to finish the painting preserved in her downtown Los Angeles studio, inspired by the afternoon light on the foothills east of Los Angeles. She completed the last details on Tuesday morning, she said, meaning the painting was likely still a little sticky.
On the exhibit's opening night, many artists' names were simply written in pencil on the walls next to their pieces, and some works were not labeled at all. But as the artists who had contributed work wandered through the gallery, some said that–almost to their surprise – they thought the hastily-assembled show was good, perhaps even better than a typical group show in Los Angeles.
'It's high and low and outsider and insider,' said Molly Tierney, whose Altadena home and studio were destroyed. 'There's a lot of interesting work.'
Moshayedi said the show aimed to be 'non-hierarchical', bringing together artists who work inside and outside the commercial art world. 'Hopefully, the visibility of some artists can help other artists who are in more perilous states of displacement,' he said, noting that the works on display ranged from $50 to $50,000 in price.
While some of the artists who contributed work had lived in areas affected by the Palisades fire, an area by the Pacific Ocean north-west of the city, the majority came from Altadena, a town nestled in the foothills east of Los Angeles.
Once relatively affordable, Altadena attracted a racially diverse and close-knit community of creative residents. It's a particular loss, said DeConto, one of the Altadena artists, 'when you've found that magical place and then that place is completely destroyed'.
Artist Devin True, 49, her partner, said and his Altadena neighbors spent the morning of the Eaton fire working to put out spot fires with garden hoses, in order to protect the houses still-standing on their block. When the water in their hoses ran out, they filled buckets from a neighbor's hot tub.
Now, with Altadena badly damaged, and rents rising across Los Angeles after the fires, 'We're not sure where we can afford to live,' True said.
What was clear, many artists said, was that they would find a way to keep creating.
'I'm beginning a new life's work, that's the way I see it,' said Robbins, the 87-year-old artist who lost his home in Altadena. 'We'll see what we can do.'
One Hundred Percent is on view through 22 February at 619 N Western Avenue in Los Angeles. It is open from Tuesday through Saturday, 11 am to 6pm