The Art World Returns to a Post-Fires Los Angeles

On January 7, the artist Kelly Akashi packed a bag at her house in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Altadena to go stay at the Los Feliz home of a friend, the Château Shatto gallery founder Olivia Barrett. The winds whipping around her home, a historic abode that before her had been inhabited by LA artists Jim Shaw and Marnie Weber, were approaching 100 miles per hour, and they were upsetting her cat. The city had also cut off her power in order to prevent the spread of fires, and she didn’t want to spend the night in the dark and cold.

Akashi—who has long been one of LA’s most beloved artist’s artists, with a fiercely devoted network of friends across age, medium, or gallery affiliation—quickly packed some essentials and family heirlooms, leaving behind the contents of her studio, the entirety of a show set to open at Lisson Gallery later that month. She didn’t want to stay too long, given the risks posed by tree branches flying through the air.

“I was thinking, Everyone’s going to go, ‘Kelly, why were you packing? You got knocked out by a branch, that was so stupid, you were so worried about a potential fire, you weren’t paying attention to the wind,’” Akashi told me this week. “So I just packed up quickly and I started driving.”

As she was leaving, she saw something glowing in the distance and ignored it, determined to make it out of the danger of the winds. A few hours later alerts started coming in on her phone that there was a fire and it was spreading. She heard there was a 10-foot inferno wall coming down her street, and the news had failed to reach some of her neighbors until it was terrifyingly late. She feared for the worst, for her home, and her studio, which contained the bronze sculptures and glass installations for her first show with a new gallery.

Los Feliz, where she was holing up, while safe from the fire, was just 15 miles away from Altadena. Soon enough, like much of the city, it would be engulfed in smoke. At Barrett’s house Akashi decided to face the inevitable.

“We went up to the top floor of the house and we could see the fire,” she said. “And I was like, ‘My house is probably burning right now.’”

A few days later, before the National Guard sealed off the neighborhood, she returned to the house, which she moved into in 2021 after years of shuttling between different pads and studios. There was seemingly nothing left except for her Skutt kiln, which had within it an intact bead of hand-blown glass, protected by the sealed-off iron drum. It at first appeared that the rest of the show had been pinned down under tons of collapsed rubble or outright destroyed. But a few days later, she and a few friends showed up in P100 masks, covered head to toe in organic clothing—“there were burning embers that had been falling out of the sky, and they said anything plastic could melt on my skin,” Akashi explained—and an extraction mandate: recover what they could from the ashes.

“My friend went with me, and he’s crazy. I mean, we were wearing protective gear but he just jumped in my studio,” she said, noting that among the many unknown toxins and hazards were a home’s worth of sharp, rusty nails. “I’m like, ‘What are you doing? Get out,’ and he’s like, ‘Look.’ And he just pulls out two bronzes, the two seedpods that are in the show. I didn’t know if they had melted. I didn’t know how hot the fire had gotten; house fires tend to get to over 1,800 degrees, but it probably didn’t get to even 1,400 at my house.”

We were speaking exactly six weeks after the fires first raged, after rains had put the fires out for good and calmed the city’s nerves—to a degree. But there was still a palpable sense of the fact that batteries, cars, and motorcycles had been incinerated in the blaze and gone…somewhere? It was a little disconcerting to see white specks blanketing my eyelashes when I returned home Tuesday evening.

Yet Akashi was optimistic. We chatted over lunch at Pink’s, a hot dog stand in Hollywood that churns out creatively topped wieners with remarkable quality. The hot dogs are named after celebrities. Akashi got the Mario Lopez dog (guacamole, chopped tomatoes, bacon bits, sour cream, jalapeños) and I got the Emeril Lagasse Bam dog (mustard, onions, cheese, jalapeños, three strips of bacon, coleslaw).

A number of collectors and dealers were in town for Frieze week, the annual bonanza of parties, dinners, and openings that has come to occupy a very specific place in Los Angeles’s pre–Academy Awards cultural schedule. After much debate, the fair was not canceled, despite the devastation. Akashi’s always a fixture of the fair week—we first met during this week years ago, at a Chateau Marmont dinner where a posse of artists, dealers, collectors, and restaurant owners lingered long after dessert on the outdoor patio—but especially on this particular year.

Akashi decided not to cancel her show, just push it back, and fill the gallery space with a suite of works that emerged from an intense period of concentrated art-making in the last few weeks. The bronzes that survived had been fished out of the ashes and now had a patina of fire. The centerpiece of the show, a hand-blown glass piece, had been at a friend’s house when the disaster struck. The rest of the work had to be cast quickly. She would sneak into the destruction zone to find snapped branches, and then cast them as bronze sculptures to install in the show.

The January show would open during Frieze week. For Akashi, there was no other option. To despair would mean to give up.

“They say, ‘You can’t be a glassblower if you can’t deal with heat and loss,’ and I’d say I’m being tested right now on both of those,” she said.

For the last decade or so, Los Angeles has become a bona fide art town, a city that yearned to shed its plastic reputation and become a hub for high art alongside the Hollywood glitz. LACMA announced its polarizing but undoubtedly ambitious expansion plan in 2013, and in 2015 mega-collector Eli Broad opened his own towering private museum across the street from MOCA. In 2016 Tinseltown bigwig Ari Emanuel bought the Frieze art fairs and plotted an outpost on the Paramount Pictures back lot, right near the New York City sets, which opened in 2019. Galleries from New York and Europe opened major LA spaces: Marian Goodman, David Zwirner, Lisson, Perrotin, Michael Werner, on and on. During the fair’s golden years, there was a general sense that Frieze LA was entering its imperial era when it rented out the Getty Villa for a chest-thumping opening bash, borrowing the backdrop of the opulent masterpiece-filled temples built by oil fortunes to set the tone for a successful week.

Now even that historic property is surrounded by devastation, barely spared the flames itself. Thousands of homes were destroyed, and hundreds of artists lost their homes and studios, sometimes watching entire archives go up in flames. Collectors saw masterpieces reduced to ash, and many who live in the city’s tony west-side neighborhood have decamped to second homes in Aspen, or Las Vegas, or New York for the winter. Many predicted that February’s Frieze week—a week The New York Times said in a headline just days before the fires, “cements Los Angeles as an international art capital”—would likely be canceled.

But Frieze decided to barrel forward with a fair that had moved to Santa Monica in order to be closer to the collectors in the Pacific Palisades, large swaths of which no longer exist. Locals mostly applauded the choice, arguing that canceling the fair would do more damage to a community that’s endured so much loss already this year. Privately, some dealers grumbled about having to pay pre-fire booth prices for a fair in a city that’s suffered $250 billion in property damages since the fair was announced. After the Grammys and the Oscars announced their own plans to move forward, and the Lakers started playing at the Crypto.com Arena, Frieze followed suit. (Perhaps it should be mentioned that Endeavor is shopping Frieze in the midst of Silver Lake Capital taking Endeavor private again, and canceling its marquee American edition could scare off anyone wading into the bidding pool.)

On Monday there was an open studio gathering hosted by several Eagle Rock–based artists (Lily Stockman, Hilary Pecis, Jake Longstreth, Mindy Shapero, Lia Halloran, and Nancy Baker Cahill) and multiple people came up to me and said, “Thank you for coming”—not thanking me for coming to eat staggeringly good tacos in a parking lot, but for coming to Los Angeles at all. There was a palpable sense of manic energy from locals in desperate need of some counterprogramming, giddy at the prospect of the global art community rolling into town. On Monday night, Tower Bar, the place that acted as a Noah’s ark for displaced Angelenos (and their pets), was filled with New Yorkers hoping the same Tinseltown magic would endure in the after times. (Residents have already taken to speaking the COVID-era markers of the “before times” and the “after times.”) By Tuesday morning the press corps had descended upon the arts district to the massive complex that is Hauser & Wirth, which was staging David Hammons’s Concerto in Black and Blue, which is a mostly empty dark gallery illuminated only by viewers’ tiny blue flashlights. Phones are locked in a Yondr pouch like a Dave Chappelle set. Word was that Hammons, the press-shy artist who’s made few public appearances in decades, was on hand to install the show.

On Tuesday night I stopped by the studio of Tristan Unrau, a pretty remarkable young painter who was recently picked up for representation by David Kordansky Gallery, which also had on view at its massive Mid City space epic exhibitions by Sam McKinniss and Lesley Vance. Unrau and I shared an Uber ride across town, and he said that what hit him most was the strangeness of the tragedy, the fact that people were learning to grieve the loss of possessions. Despite the widespread devastation, for the most part, things were going back to normal.

“It would have been a little ridiculous if they canceled everything,” he said. “The first Saturday after everything was eerily quiet, but after that it was busy again.”

Case in point: Unrau and I were headed to a Frieze kickoff party not at the Getty Villa as in years past, but at another kind of Getty villa—the home of family heir Balthazar Getty high atop the Sunset Strip, where we were greeted with a massive bowl of free cigarettes (I noticed an uptick of smoking in general), a gigantic taxidermy polar bear in the library, and Getty himself, who was ducking well-wishers yelling “Balty!” in his direction.

After that, Vanity Fair editor at large Lorraine Nicholson hosted a dinner at her Laurel Canyon home to celebrate the opening of “Ponyshow,” an exhibition put together by curator Jed Moch, with some of the proceeds from the sales benefiting fire relief. What a cross section of New Yorkers and Angelenos: the actor Logan Lerman chatting near Al Pacino and Danny Huston while New Yorker writer Naomi Fry was testing out some questions with London-based artist Issy Wood. (Fry would be interviewing Wood at her show at Michael Werner Gallery in Beverly Hills the next day.) The artist Honor Titus and the pop star Kim Petras were there, with work by Kai Althoff, Sam Anderson, Uri Aran, Jan Gatewood, Eric N. Mack, and Ed Ruscha on the walls as part of the show. Gatewood was among the artists in attendance, alongside the model/influencer Devon Lee Carlson and the filmmaker Nadia Lee Cohen. Artist Rose Salane was standing near the rocker Holden Jaffe of Del Water Gap, and David O. Russell was leaving as the artist Calvin Marcus arrived. Theo Niarchos was there, having just opened a stellar show at his Hollywood space, Maison d’Art, of work by Cy Twombly from the collection of the Cologne doctor Reiner Speck.

Subscribe to True Colors, Nate Freeman’s art-world dispatch.Arrow

On Wednesday, the Felix fair opened at the Hollywood Roosevelt, ahead of a vast spree of openings throughout the city. Gagosian has an Alex Israel show, and next week it opens its Oscar weekend exhibition: three portraits of Bob Dylan by Richard Prince. David Zwirner has Lisa Yuskavage’s first LA show in years, Blum is showing a survey of Yoshitomo Nara sculptures, and Doug Aitken has shows at Regen Projects and the Marciano Foundation. Marian Goodman hosted Bruce Nauman’s first LA show in decades, Karma unveiled a suite of new sculptures by Woody De Othello, and the dealer Sam Parker opened the doors of his new Parker Gallery space on Melrose with work by Daisy Sheff and Joe Minter.

On Wednesday night, Matthew Marks opened his gallery’s first show with the painter Jacqueline Humphries, and the dinner at nearby restaurant Ysabel attracted a slew of the city’s museum directors, prominent local collectors, and artists from across all types of mega-galleries. Perhaps out of denial, or nerves over how the fair would go the next day, the fires were not a topic of conversation at my table.

Frieze opened Thursday morning just a few miles from the devastation of the Pacific Palisades, and an hour after the first VIPs arrived at the Santa Monica Airport, the place was packed. Hauser & Wirth sold out its booth of paintings by Ambera Wellmann, presented with Company Gallery, all in the low six figures. Karma sold works in the six figures by Jonas Wood, Calvin Marcus, and Reggie Burrows Hodges. Matthew Brown had a rush of offers for work by Sasha Gordon, and Kordansky sold out its booth of work by Maia Cruz Palileo. Gagosian was still looking for a buyer for Chris Burden’s Nomadic Folly, an interactive tented installation that was first shown at the Istanbul Biennial in the weeks after September 11, 2001. Gwyneth Paltrow came down from Montecito for the festivities. James Franco, fresh off his appearance at SNL 50, was on the ground, presumably to talk up his recently revived artistic practice. Esther Kim Varet, the gallery owner turned congressional candidate in Orange County, sat down at a picnic table to take a Zoom call with her campaign team to discuss talking points. One adviser stopped by to say that she was walking the rapper Kid Cudi through the fair. He’s a Sunday painter now.

I made my way to Lisson Gallery to see Akashi’s full show on Thursday before the fair. There were delicate wall installations and mysterious sculptures, made from glass, from rock, from stone, from bronze, all installed on Corten steel pedestals, a real-time chronicle of the first few months of 2025 in Los Angeles. The works recovered from the wreckage of the house are triumphantly on view, bearing their scars from the flames.

One, a wall sculpture of half a head, called Witness, listed its media: “Eaton Fire patinated lost-wax cast bronze and flame-worked borosilicate glass.” It’s undeniable: The flames give the work an incredible red patina that seems otherworldly, an artwork crafted by the hand of a furious fire god. The recovered work might be too pat a metaphor for a city rising from the ashes, but it also matches Akashi’s unbowed optimism in the face of ecological collapse, and her unbending faith in Los Angeles and its artists. We had spoken a little bit about these themes at Pink’s earlier in the week.

“I am sorry if I start crying,” she said as we took the last bites of our hot dogs. “The best possible outcome is that people really remember that art has a value outside of the market. Because I think the way the community has come together has shown us a power that maybe we’ve kind of forgotten about.”

This year, in conjunction with our Oscar-week events, Vanity Fair is supporting the efforts of two local organizations helping Angelenos: the Motion Picture & Television Fund and Baby2Baby. We encourage you to donate to these or other charities supporting the city and families.

Have a tip? Drop me a line at [email protected]. And make sure you subscribe to True Colors to receive Nate Freeman’s art-world dispatch in your inbox every week.