Los Angeles artists mourn as studios and artwork go up in smoke

Artists who lived and worked in Altadena and Pacific Palisades are concerned about the irreparable loss of their work and livelihoods.

Los Angeles artist Alec Egan spent two years preparing work for a solo show scheduled to open in late January at the Anat Ebgi Gallery on Wilshire Boulevard. Now, all those canvases are gone.

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

Egan is one of several Los Angeles artists who lost their studios, their artwork — and in some cases, their homes — in this week’s 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.

Diane Tater, an artist known for her nature-inspired films and light installations, and her husband, conceptual artist T. Kelly Mason, stored their archive, including decades of raw footage, master tapes, hard drives, and paintings, in a temperature-controlled garage that burned to the ground along with their Altadena home. The remains of their home are pictured above.

"It’s hard to get to 62 and lose your whole life overnight," Tater said from a friend’s house in nearby Atwater, where she and Mason sleep on the floor with their three cats.

Also gone is the work she was commissioned to do for the reopening of the expanded Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2026. “The raw footage is what kills me,” Tater said. “Now all we have is in this little room.”

Tools and materials can be replaced, like melted camera equipment, which Tater estimates to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. But a work of art is irreplaceable.

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

Artist Camille Taylor mourns “over 20 years of work,” including hundreds, if not thousands, of prints, drawings, and sculptures in metal, ceramics, and glass, that she had stored in her now-demolished West Altadena home studio. She was preparing for three shows this year, including one at the University of Nevada, Reno. “I’m usually a last-minute artist, but I was so pleased with myself — half the work for the show in December was done,” she said. “Now it’s all gone.”

Kelly Akashi, who creates haunting glass and bronze sculptures about the impermanence of the natural world, was expecting to return to her Altadena home and studio when she left for a friend’s house Tuesday night. “You look around and think, What am I going to do, lug a bunch of sculptures into my Honda?” she said.

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

Egan, the artist who lost work for his upcoming exhibition, lived and worked in the house he grew up in on Bienveneda Avenue in Pacific Palisades. He described watching the fire spread from his window while his wife was taking a shower. “There was a small column of smoke, and by the time she got out of the shower, it was the size of 30 football fields,” he said. “Within an hour, the sky was black.”

Sending his wife and children ahead, Egan initially stayed behind to try to organize trucks to rescue his paintings. But his efforts quickly proved fruitless and foolish: the entire neighborhood was rushing to evacuate because of him. When he returned a few days later, Egan said his house had been “burned to the ground.”

Many Pacific Palisades residents have lost valuable art and family heirlooms. Some of Los Angeles’ wealthiest collectors are concentrated in the city’s west side, which includes Pacific Palisades.

On Tuesday night, as a wildfire engulfed lawns, a man hopped on his bike and handed two paintings to nearby NBC Los Angeles reporter Robert Kovacik for safekeeping. “The backyard is on fire,” the cyclist said in a video that went viral on social media. “I’m out of here.”

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

Artist Ross Simonini said he lived right down the street from Paul McCarthy. “We lost our house, my studio, all my art from the beginning,” Simonini said by phone from a stop on Interstate 5. He was driving with his wife, baby, and dog to visit his father in Northern California. “It’s so devastating to see it now. I have an aerial photo of our neighborhood and six blocks in each direction, and there’s nothing there.”