Margaret Griffith closed the windows of her family’s home art studio as the Eaton Fire moved toward their Altadena house, but she never thought it would be completely destroyed. So she didn’t think to take her piles of sketchbooks that held years of ideas for art installations and sculptures.
Griffith and her husband, Jamison Carter, are among an untold number of artists in the disaster area who lost their studios, galleries and a lifetime of work. And that’s on top of losing their home.
Griffith says she hurriedly packed laptops and family jewelry, but didn’t even grab family photos.
“I thought once I do that, I’m going to start grabbing everything, and I’m going to just lose it completely,” Griffith says. “Because then it’s not one thing — you can’t grab, you can’t hold onto it all.”
Now it’s all gone.
Griffith was lucky that one of her pieces had just been sent out to be powder coated two days before, so it didn’t burn in the fire. And there are still photos online of some of her work, which includes dainty ribbons of aluminum and paper that weave and flow in various shapes in galleries.
One of them, a piece called “Catherine,” is a vibrant blue sheet that drapes down from the gallery ceiling. “That was based on a gate pattern from Catherine the Great’s palace in Russia, because a lot of my work deals with boundaries and barriers and also concepts that relate to impermanence,” Griffith says, pointing out that gates to structures often provide a false sense of security, “which is clearly evident in what’s happening to us right now.”Griffith is talking about the fact that the gate to her home actually survived the fire unscathed, while the house and studio didn’t. Carter and Griffith, who are also community college art professors, lost all of the tools they used for large metal sculptures and installations.
Carter sees art mirroring life through all of this. Before the disaster, he’d been working on a steel piece abstractly modeled after their family of four. It broke in transit and he had been working frantically to try to get it ready for a show.
“I can’t help but think that the struggle I was dealing with, with that piece, was a precursor to what was to come,” Carter says. “I was working really hard to get this piece together that represented my family to me and then now, all I’m doing, once we left that house – once I saw the fire, actually – I’m just here to take care of my family.”
Altadena provided a home for many other artists, who found community living near like-minded people.
“Being artists and moving into just a regular neighborhood, we’re the weirdos. And it’s not the case [in Altadena],” Carter says. “Everybody was eclectic and strange and had interesting things in their homes, interesting conversations. Everybody was into something different, but we were all creators. And it was a huge support system.”
Part of that support system was a couple of blocks away, at the artist-run Alto Beta Gallery, which fellow artist Brad Eberhard opened in 2022 to feature up-and-coming and mid-career contemporary artists.
Like Griffith and Carter, Eberhard didn’t expect the fire to sweep through the city. On the day of the fire, Eberhard was photographing pieces for an upcoming exhibit. The Santa Ana winds howled outside as he locked up the gallery door and headed home, not knowing that there would be nothing to come back to.
“About every 20 minutes, I remember another piece that comes to mind,” Eberhard says. “I’m not trying to remember those pieces – and I realize that they’re gone.”
Eberhard says Ruth Gallery in Pasadena has stepped up to host the next two planned Alto Beta shows, as his gallery searches for a new home.
“I don’t understand it, but I know that this tragic experience has increased my awareness that art is valuable and meaningful to people, and not because someone told them it’s meaningful,” Eberhard says, “but because … when they see it go away, when they see it destroyed, they know that that’s bad.”
In the days after the fire, a neighbor sifted through the remains of the gallery and found two of his ceramic works, including one in the shape of lungs. Eberhard was able to wash the ash off the lungs and will be able to use it in an upcoming show.
A neighbor found Brad Eberhard’s lung sculpture mostly intact amid the ashes of his Alto Beta Gallery in Altadena. Eberhard later was able to retrieve several more ceramic pieces. Photo courtesy of Brad Eberhard.
Since then, he’s recovered a few other works, some damaged, some not. All of them were changed by a second, unintended ceramic firing.
Eberhard plans to use some of the recovered pieces in an upcoming exhibit called Rocks with fellow artist Robert Gunderman. It opens February 3 at the gallery at Mount San Jacinto College in Menifee.
Griffith and Carter plan to rebuild and say many of their neighbors will be back, too. In fact, the couple wants to rebuild their art studio first, to live in and work in while their home is reconstructed.
Their family has set up a GoFundMe campaign to help the couple and their two teenage daughters with the long rebuilding process.
But it will take time for the Altadena art community to return. It could take months or longer to start clearing the ashy landscape and even longer to fully process emotionally what happened.
In the meantime, Griffith plans to start a new sketchbook with ideas. And she says they’ll build new tables for working on pieces, as they did when they first started out.
“Altadena allowed me the psychic space to be who I am and not feel overwhelmed by a hustling, bustling city,” Carter says. “That’s what I hope we can get back to.”