‘This Is Our Pompeii’: Altadena Artists Picking Up the Pieces

The artist John Knuth surveys the desolate landscape around Mariposa Street, in Altadena, Calif., where he lived with his wife, the interior designer Taylor Jacobson, and their young son. Where once were pretty wood and stucco houses, you can now see clear across city blocks. The vista is interrupted only by singed, leafless trees and free-standing stone and brick chimneys which, Knuth says, “have become like gravestones.”

Knuth, 46, is one of scores of artists who, until early this January, had homes in Altadena. He knows of four other artists on his block alone. Most chose Altadena for its affordable, modest homes, its proximity to nature, and its charming, small-town feel. Others grew up there. Many had space on their properties for home studios.

More than two months after the Eaton fire destroyed Altadena, its artists are taking stock of what they have lost, and what their future could look like. Just as important as studio space and materials, they have found, are the reassuring foundations of home and community. Artworks, in many cases, can be remade. A street, or a whole neighborhood, is a different matter.

“I can make art anywhere,” Knuth says. “I’m not worried about that.” Jacobson, 49, worked primarily from home, and lost items from her library of material samples, as well as some vintage furnishings. Knuth considers himself lucky, comparatively. Last July, he signed the lease on a new studio, which was spared from the fire. He had moved nearly all his paintings, sculptures, books and tools out of his garage, where he’d previously worked. Also saved was his collection of natural media, such as dead horseshoe crabs and coyote penis bones, which he’s used to make abstract drawings and paintings.

But he had not yet gotten around to transferring his heavy flat-files, which contained 20 years of works on paper, including ombré paintings made by feeding colored sugar water to houseflies. They now sit, blackened by soot, in what little remains of his garage.

“This is our Pompeii,” Knuth says.

Across the street Knuth and Jacobson’s neighbors Christopher Miller and Lynnanne Hanson-Miller, endured the reverse fate. The couple’s cream Colonial-style bungalow still stands, but it was Christopher’s detached workshop, where he carved jewelry from bone and stone, that burned to the ground, along with a shed storing a lifetime’s collection of books, artworks and dance costumes.

Mariposa Street lies in the less affluent, racially diverse western side of Altadena. The Millers, both in their mid-70s, bought their house there in the late 1990s. Nearby, Lynnanne says, was “a drug house,” which police visited regularly. These days, Christopher notes, there are more dog walkers, and more people pushing strollers. To rebuild their “little piece of paradise,” as Lynnanne calls it, seems impossibly daunting given the time and resources they invested in it.

Despite the demand for the stars, suns, moons, frames and other ornaments that Christopher sells — Linda Ronstadt was once a client — Lynnanne says that they have always struggled to get by, and have only modest retirement benefits through one of her part-time jobs as a dance teacher. Christopher cannot fathom setting himself up again. Impulsively creative, he says he has restless hands, but even to start working at a small scale would require space, with dust extraction equipment and specialist tools. Not to mention the inspiration he drew from his collection of books and antiques.

Unlike Pompeii, Altadena was not uniformly obliterated. Even in the worst damaged areas, there are homes — like that of the Millers — that still stand, while all around them is ashen debris. But the Millers’ house is unlivable. Their heating, ventilation and air-conditioning system, every interior surface in the home and all their belongings must be cleaned of toxic ash by specialist companies that are overwhelmed by demand.

A few doors down from the Millers, the sculptor Mark Whalen, 42, had purchased a fixer-upper with his wife, Kimberly Whalen, 43, in 2022. Over a year later, their renovation was completed. The couple used part of the house as a shared painting and jewelry studio. They lived on Mariposa Street for just 15 months before their property was razed.

Whalen lost around 15 fabricated elements of sculptures, many for a planned exhibition with the gallery Harper’s, in Santa Monica. Though handmade by craftspeople, these items could be reproduced at short order: a pink onyx conch was recarved in Mexico, and blown glass pieces were remade at a studio in Sweden, at considerable cost. Kimberly lost all of her jewelry materials as well.

A little farther down the block lived the artists Rachelle Sawatsky, 41, and Kate Mosher Hall, 38, in a 500-square-foot corner bungalow they bought in 2016. “It was the cheapest house on Redfin,” the real estate listings website, Mosher Hall recalls when we meet at her studio, a few miles away in Glendale. The couple had gradually improved the property themselves, and cultivated a compact but thriving garden.

On her last birthday, Sawatsky organized all her unsold work, including abstract paintings on canvas, glazed ceramics and works on paper, and stored it in her garage. “I was like, ‘I’m making this time capsule of my entire life before age 41 and I’m going to be the keeper of it,’” she recalls. All of it is now gone.

Mosher Hall’s mixed-media paintings often incorporate silk-screened photographs or found images; on a visit to her studio, a new black-and-white painting reproduced a smaller canvas she had lost in the fire. Poignantly, it features a simplified outline of a house, with pitched roof and chimney. She added smoky charcoal dust, and a shadow that makes the picture look as if it is lit from below — a fantasy vision of her old painting in the moment before it burned.

Sawatsky and Mosher Hall’s home was at the top of a narrow private road, perpendicular to Mariposa Street. The 11 other homes on this road formed a micro-community. Their small lots meant that neighbors often interacted as they barbecued or worked in their front yards. Sawatsky says that, like many artists, she and Mosher Hall are interested in “ways of living that are unconventional or that aren’t necessarily about creating domestic privacy.” The couple was warmly welcomed into this tight-knit community.

“We’re rebuilding,” Sawatsky firmly declares. “Our goal is to have as many of our neighbors move back as possible.”

Among these 12 houses, there is a range of ages and backgrounds, including three older adults and some who are underinsured. To that end, the neighbors plan to present a design package to a contractor, so they can pool resources and access to plumbers and electricians, saving both money and time. “It’s more important for me that more of my neighbors come back than I have the most interesting Modernist designed house,” Sawatsky says.

The artist Kelly Akashi, 41, who lived a few blocks east of Mariposa Street, would sometimes drop in on Mosher Hall and Sawatsky on her walk to the coffee shop. Akashi’s home and adjacent studio, which she’d bought in 2021, both burned, along with new glass, bronze and stone sculptures and paintings made for an exhibition at Lisson Gallery in Los Angeles.

Like Whalen, Akashi managed to replace most of the damaged work with help from fabricators in time for her show, which opened Feb. 20. She even made new cast bronze sculptures of hands (her own) holding sticks and branches that she’d plucked from piles of windblown debris. What are not so quickly replaced are the rare materials and tools Akashi collected through the years, including obscure samples of colored glass.

Most of the artists I spoke to emphasized west Altadena’s history, since the 1960s, as an enclave for the region’s Black middle class. Many Black families have owned their homes for generations. Not far from Mariposa Street, the artist, publisher and filmmaker Martine Syms, 36, grew up on a cul-de-sac where all the families knew each other. She moved away in 2005, but she often returned to the home where, until January this year, her parents, two siblings and her two nephews were living. As with almost every house on her street, she says, “it was a total loss.”

Syms told me that she was recently discussing with Mosher Hall “the future and past grief,” that is, losing both her history and her possible future. “It’s a trite example,” she says, “but if I have a kid, they’ll never see the house I grew up in.”

Mosher Hall echoes the sentiment. She relates how, when facing past challenges in her life, she consoled herself with the thought that “‘the future seems hard, but I’ve got my past, I’ve got this foundation.’ Or, if the past seems bad, you’re like, ‘I’ve got the future. I can go do this.’” With the loss of her home and community, she says, both past and future “collapse in front of you at the same time.”

Artists have a unique capacity to picture what does not yet exist. For now, however, dreaming is not easy. “What this fire has taken from me is the ability to envision some ideal that I’m going to work really hard toward,” said the painter Christina Quarles. “I can’t think of anything right now that isn’t just marred by compromise.”

In the past year, Quarles, 39, has suffered not one but two fires in Altadena. In April 2024, the house where she lived with her wife and daughter, a few blocks from Mariposa Street, burned in an electrical fire. This January, the house they were building on an adjacent lot, filled with their recently reacquired possessions, also burned down.

Quarles wants to rebuild, but she is worried. Will she be able to insure the large figurative paintings that she wants to make there? Will the toxic earth be allowed to recuperate, given people’s rush to rebuild? Will the community be sickened in the years to come? And greatest of all worries, what kind of legacy will she be giving her daughter if she stays?

Across the street from Quarles lived Joy Silverman and George Bermudez, both in their 70s, whose daughter Sula Bermudez-Silverman, 32, has an exhibition of sculpture up now at Hannah Hoffman Gallery centered on a silver-painted sculpture of a house, split open. Along with their home, the family lost an art collection that included early sculptures and textiles by Bermudez-Silverman.

Before we leave Mariposa Street, Knuth has one thing he wants to do. He retrieves three pots of wildflower seeds from his car, and scatters them across his backyard.

Knuth acknowledges the irony that it was weeds and wildflowers, which thrived after unusually heavy rains last winter, that fed the recent fires. This topsoil will soon be excavated and transported to a landfill somewhere. But maybe, before then, something might flower.

“Don’t eat my seeds, crows!” he shouts at the birds in the trees.