LOS ANGELES — Unprecedented wildfires are still burning in parts of Los Angeles County, causing so much damage that it’s almost impossible to measure in Altadena. Located 14 miles northwest of downtown, Altadena is a very diverse, solidly middle-class community that artists flock to for its affordability, spaciousness, and proximity to nature and culture.
Today, much of it lies in ruins, with decades of legacy burned to the ground—from Gary Indiana’s personal library to the sprawling Zorthian Ranch arts community to countless homes and buildings—with no clear prospects for restoration, Artists are reflecting on this shocking loss and beginning to imagine what the future might look like.
Artist Paul McCarthy and his family purchased land in 1989 and moved there, using his skills as a builder. “Their dream was to build a house, and Altadena was the place where they could make it happen,” his gallerist daughter Mara McCarthy told us allergic. “They built it from the ground up.” In 2007, Marla moved back to Altadena from New York, looking for “a place where I could have a chance to do something” and bought a house nearby. Her brother Damon also lives in the area.
Now all three houses are gone. She said her mother was eager to start making plans for a new house, but for her, “right now, it’s just a matter of survival.”
Altadena is very diverse and has a thriving black community. About four-fifths of black residents own their homes, twice the national rate. That’s especially true west of Lake Avenue in West Altadena, one of the only areas in the area where blacks could buy homes before the racist redlining policy was outlawed in the 1960s. This is where artist Kenturah Davis grew up and where several members of her mother’s family moved in the 1970s.
“This is a massive migration from Arkansas,” Davis told allergic. “We joked that we couldn’t date anyone in Altadena because we might be related to them.”
After relocating a few years ago, Davis decided to return to Altadena when she became pregnant with her son, now 2 years old. “I was thinking about what kind of life I wanted him to have, and I thought about how wonderful it was to grow up there, to be close to nature, to be exposed to the rest of Los Angeles,” Davis said.
She moved back to her hometown in 2022 and bought a house that she later discovered shared a fence with her family’s first house in Altadena. Both buildings are now gone, along with the nearby home where her parents lived for 40 years, and her aunt’s house.
“I’m torn between sadness and gratitude,” Davis said, “overwhelmed by all the resources that have surfaced.” Although she’s still dealing with the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, she said she hopes to rebuild there.
“Altadena has a very special character and I wouldn’t want to change that,” she said. “I hate that so many people have been displaced by the greed of developers. It has a real hometown feel. I feel a responsibility to keep this area alive.”
Diversity is part of what drew longtime arts worker and former executive director of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) Joy Silverman to Altadena. In 1999, she married her husband, George Bermudez, a psychologist and professor, and their youngest daughter, Sula Bermudez-Silverman, who is now an artist. A medieval house was purchased there. On the evening of Tuesday, January 7, they spent the night at Sula’s house to celebrate her birthday. Since they only received a fire warning, not an evacuation order, they packed only three pieces of art: a silhouetted leaf gifted by Ana Mendieta, a gift from Lari Pittman A gourd with the word “Hope” painted on it, and a piece of art her daughter is looking forward to returning.
They were awakened by an evacuation siren at 3 a.m., and when Bermudez drove back home, the house was engulfed in flames. “We lost everything,” he told Silverman by phone.
“We have such a rich community in so many ways and the history is amazing,” Silverman said. “It has diversity, artists, architects, scientists, rich people, poor people, that’s normal. We love it.”
Writer and artist Ross Simonini, who moved to Altadena in 2020, writes fondly of the area’s heterogeneous environment, which he considers quintessentially Los Angeles.
“It has a very L.A. art history, a weird mixture of various types of economic, esoteric and professional sensibilities — it’s all there,” said Simonini, who speaks from Northern California with his wife and Three of them had evacuated their one-month-old baby there.
He lost his home and studio, where he also organized exhibitions and performances under the name “Alicia Quarter”.
Painter John Knuth moved his family to Altadena a decade ago, buying a house on a quiet street full of cars, kids on bikes and people on horseback. Although he recently moved into his surviving studio, he lost 25 years of personal archives and artwork in the fire, as well as materials from the Circus Gallery and Ambach & Rice Gallery, where he was a curator.
A few houses on his block survived, but a street away “it was like Dresden, just chimneys and dead trees,” he said. “We wanted to live the rest of our lives in that house, but now I don’t know what our future will look like.”
Gallery Alto Beta, located in a strip mall between the pizza restaurant and the Altadena performance venue Public Displays, was completely destroyed, owner Brad Eberhard told us. allergic.
Among the losses were paintings by Mary Anna Pomonis, whose exhibition had just opened at the gallery, as well as much of Eberhard’s own artwork, his library of art books, and “I started when I was 12 I started collecting all the records,” he said, adding: “I lost my spiritual center.”
Many people have found a silver lining in this disaster: a heightened sense of community and kinship. Pasadena’s Ruth Gallery has offered to host Alto Beta’s next two shows, starting with an exhibition of Brian Randolph’s meticulous abstract paintings that opens on February 9.
“I’ve never experienced so much appreciation in my life,” Eberhard said. “The art world has never been more real to me than it is now.”
Also destroyed by the fire was Zorthian Ranch, a 45-acre creative community at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains. It was founded by the late artist and craftsman Jirayr Zorthian, who immigrated to the United States in 1922 when his family fled the Armenian Genocide when he was a boy. They settled in New Haven, Connecticut, where he later studied art at Yale University. In the late 1940s, Zorthian and his first wife purchased land in the Altadena foothills and slowly built on the land using what he could scavenge.
“He spent his whole life building this palace out of discarded materials,” his granddaughter Tara Zorthian told reporters. allergic. “Everything except the main house and the pool he built out of things people threw away.”
Although Zotian was an accomplished artist, having created several murals for the Public Works Progress Administration, he remained on the fringes of the mainstream art world. “He didn’t want to play art games,” Tara explains. The ranch became a center for alternative arts and culture, welcoming everyone from Charlie Parker to Andy Warhol to physicist Richard Feynman.
Zorthian died in 2004 at the age of 92 and passed the estate to some of his children. Tara, her cousins, and other family members have spent much of the past decade cleaning up the ranch, hosting community events, tours, and exhibitions, and sorting and organizing Zorthian’s extensive archives, which include a lifetime of artwork, family Photos, movies, and letters.
“The archives are the culmination of our efforts. No one has really experienced this,” Tara’s cousin Caroline told us allergic. “It’s a labor of love.”
Last Tuesday night, as the Eaton Fire approached, they moved most of the animals on the ranch — goats, horses, sheep, pigs and cattle — to shelters or opened fences so they could escape. They tried spraying the building with water but were eventually forced to evacuate around 3am.
“Never before has a fire hit us so quickly,” Caroline said. Some buildings survived, but the archives and artwork stored in storage containers and in the cellars beneath the main house were all lost.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen next,” she said. “Maybe it will be a new blank page.”
