An LA artist lost everything in the fire. Even her ‘Monument to Loss’

Los Angeles: Painter Alec Egan had spent two years preparing work for a solo exhibition that was scheduled to open in late January at Anat Ebgi gallery on Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica, Los Angeles. Now every one of those canvases is gone.

“It’s terror and despair,” said Egan in a telephone interview from the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he, his wife and two young children had evacuated – the only hotel he said was open.

In a photo provided by Alec Egan shows his home, which was destroyed in a fire, and with it the artworks he had created for a show.Credit: Alec Egan via The New York Times

Egan is among several Los Angeles artists who lost their studios, their artworks – and in some cases their homes – in the LA fires. Now many are picking up the pieces of their lives and worrying about whether they’ll be able to make a living anytime soon.

Diana Thater, an artist celebrated for her nature-inspired film and light installations, and her husband, conceptual artist T. Kelly Mason, stored their archive – including decades’ worth of raw video footage, master tapes, hard drives and paintings – in a temperature-controlled garage that burnt to the ground along with their home in Altadena.

“It’s hard to live to be 62 years old and lose your entire life in one night,” Thater said from a friend’s house in nearby Atwater Village, where she and Mason are sleeping on the floor with their three cats.

Also gone is a work in progress she had been commissioned to make for the reopening of the expanded Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2026. “The raw footage is the thing that kills me,” Thater said. “Now, everything we have is in this tiny room.”

Camilla Taylor is mourning more than “20 years of art making” that was lost in her West Altadena home studio.Credit: Brad Torchia/The New York Times

Tools and materials can be replaced, like the melted camera equipment whose value Thater estimated at hundreds of thousands of dollars. But the artwork is irreplaceable.

Multimedia artist Kathryn Andrews lost her Pacific Palisades home and her entire art collection, including works she had bought or acquired through trades with prominent artists such as Rashid Johnson, Jim Shaw and Charles Long. “They serve as markers of this beautiful network of friendship that happens amongst artists,” Andrews said. “It’s just really sad to lose that. Insurance can’t replace that.”

Artist Camilla Taylor is mourning more than “20 years of art-making”, including hundreds, if not thousands, of prints, drawings, and sculptures in metal, ceramic and glass that she stored in her West Altadena home studio, now rubble. She had been preparing for three exhibitions this year, including one at the University of Nevada, Reno. “Usually, I’m a very last-minute artist, but I was so pleased with myself – half of the work for a show in December was done,” she said. “Now it’s evaporated.”

Kelly Akashi, who makes haunting glass and bronze sculptures about the impermanence of the natural world, expected to return to her Altadena home and studio when she left and drove to a friend’s house Tuesday evening. “You’re looking around, what am I going to do, lug a bunch of sculptures in my Honda?” she said.

The smouldering wreckage of the Altadena home of Diana Thater and T. Kelly Mason, where they stored their archive in a garage that also burnt to the ground. Credit: T. Kelly Mason via The New York Times

In the end the fire claimed Akashi’s home and studio, including archival work, recent sculptures and several pieces she planned to show at her inaugural exhibition at Lisson Gallery in Los Angeles later this month. She had considered naming one of her recent works “Monument to Loss”. Now it is actually lost.

Egan lived and worked in the house he grew up in on Bienveneda Avenue in the Pacific Palisades. He described watching the fire spread from his window while his wife was in the shower. “There was a little tiny plume of smoke, and by the time she got out of the shower the plume was 30 football fields big,” he said. “Within the hour the sky was black.”

Sending his wife and children out ahead of him, Egan initially stayed behind to try to arrange for trucks to rescue his paintings. But his effort quickly proved fruitless and ill-advised: the entire neighbourhood was rushing to evacuate around him. When he returned days later, Egan said, his house had “burnt to the ground.”

Many Pacific Palisades residents have lost treasured artworks and family heirlooms. Some of the wealthiest collectors in Los Angeles are concentrated on the west side of the city, which includes Pacific Palisades.

As the wildfire swept across the lawns, a man hopped onto his bicycle and handed two paintings to a nearby NBC Los Angeles reporter, Robert Kovacik, for safekeeping. “Backyard’s on fire,” the cyclist said in a video that has gone viral on social media. “I’m out of here.”

Among the celebrated artists in Altadena whose homes or studios are known to have been damaged or destroyed by the fire was Paul McCarthy, who lived in Altadena near his daughter, Mara, a gallerist, and his son, Damon, also an artist. “It’s the home I grew up in,” Mara said in a telephone interview from a friend’s house in Silver Lake. “Our whole family, our whole community, is devastated.” As a result of the fire, she added, her father had postponed his upcoming show at Hauser & Wirth in London.

Artist Ross Simonini said he lived down the street from McCarthy. “We lost our home, my studio, all my art from — ever,” Simonini said by telephone from a rest stop off Interstate 5. He was on his way with his wife, infant and dog to stay with his father in Northern California.

“It’s so horrific, seeing it now. I have an aerial shot from our neighbourhood, and six blocks in every direction, there’s nothing.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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