Some artists lost their life’s work in LA wildfires. Fellow artists are helping them recover

LOS ANGELES (news agencies) — Anthony Obi never imagined the night of Jan. 7 would be the last time he’d step inside his safe haven.

The Houston rapper, known professionally as Fat Tony, has lived in the Altadena neighborhood for a year and says he and his neighbors were prepared for heavy winds and perhaps a few days of power outages.

“I totally expected, you know, maybe my windows are going to get damaged, and I’ll come back in like a day or two and just clean it up,” said the rapper.

But residents like Obi woke up the following morning to news that thousands of homes and entire neighborhoods had been burned to ash, destroyed by flames that wiped out large areas of Pacific Palisades and Altadena. Although the neighborhoods are on opposite ends of the county, they are known hubs for many of the city’s creative community, housing filmmakers, actors, musicians and artists of various mediums.

“LA is not just rich, famous people who have giant mansions that were destroyed,” said visual artist Andrea Bowers, who is assisting artists recover. “So many members of our community lost everything, they lost all their artworks and their archives, that’s irreplaceable, a lifetime of labor and a lifetime of research.”

“A lot of my collectors lost their homes,” said figurative and conceptual artist Salomón Huerta, who lost his Altadena home of three years to the Eaton Fire and worries the art scene in LA will downsize as a result of the wildfire. “Before the fire, I was in talks with certain collectors. And then, after the fire, they’re not in a good place to talk. I’m hoping that there’s support so that the art scene can still thrive. But it’s going to be tough.”

Obi and Huerta lost not only personal treasures, business opportunities and homes but also vital equipment and professional archives, adding to their emotional burden.

Huerta left behind slides and transparencies of past work that he had planned to digitize for an upcoming book.

“Everything’s gone,” Obi said. “All of my stuff that is related to Fat Tony music that was in that house is gone, and it was the motherlode of it.”

Kathryn Andrews never imagined she’d experience another wildfire in her lifetime.

The conceptual artist was forced to flee her Pacific Palisades neighborhood as smoke drew near, the second time in four years she’s had to escape a wildfire.

She lost her Juniper Hills property to the 2020 Bobcat fire, which burned a large section of rural Los Angeles County.

“I’ve already experienced one home being burned. I think you have a different focus after that. Maybe we become a little bit less attached to material things. And we began looking at a bigger long-term picture, thinking about, you know, how we live together in community, how we live in relation to the land and how we can work together to solve this,” she said.

Andrews is the co-founder of relief effort Grief and Hope, which aims to support creatives financially as they enter the long road ahead and was founded alongside a group of gallery directors, art professionals and artists like Bowers, Ariel Pittman, Olivia Gauthier, and Julia V. Hendrickson.

“Our primary goal is getting people triage money for just whatever the most emergent need is,” said Pittman.

The fundraising effort began shortly after the fires broke out with a Go Fund Me seeking $500,000. They have now raised over $940,000 of their new $1 million goal via non-profit art space The Brick. As of Tuesday, Grief and Hope has received more than 450 inquiries, and Pittman says the funds will be evenly distributed to applicants. The deadline for artists to submit a needs survey has concluded, but the relief effort will continue fundraising until mid-March.

Grief and Hope also has five different groups of volunteers providing peer-to-peer support, helping with medical needs, safety issues, and renter’s issues and collecting survey data to better serve their creative community.

“These are people who already have made very long term commitments in their work, including the five of us, towards building community and building sustainability around artists and art workers in our city and beyond,” said Pittman.

For Grief and Hope, creating a more sustainable future for artists throughout the city begins with affordable studio spaces and housing.

For photographer Joy Wong, losing her home of eight years meant losing the beauty of Altadena. She describes the overall area as “a pocket of heaven.”