When artist Kathryn Andrews misplaced her house within the Palisades hearth, it was not the primary time. 5 years earlier, her home in Juniper Hills burned to the bottom within the Bobcat hearth.
That stage of loss can destroy an individual, or it could actually construct them stronger. In Andrews’ case, the latter got here to cross. As an alternative of retreating into isolation, she turned her consideration outward — towards service.
A month after the Palisades hearth, Andrews — together with 4 different Los Angeles-based feminine artists and artwork staff — based Grief & Hope. The mutual help fund aimed to supply direct help to artists and cultural staff displaced by the catastrophe, as shortly as attainable. The volunteer-run effort raised $1.74 million, which was distributed to just about 300 folks throughout Los Angeles County.
The premise was easy, but novel, amongst disaster-relief initiatives. Assist was not merit-based or contingent on tax returns. Candidates wanted solely to display their proximity to the fires and their connection to the humanities.
“We weren’t qualified to determine someone else’s need,” Andrews mentioned in a current interview. “The scale of loss is just too large, and it shows up in ways you can’t always quantify.”
The mannequin supplied proof {that a} kinder system may exist alongside the extra stringent, rules-based reduction funds that generally missed the mark, Andrews mentioned.
The cash raised, nevertheless, was modest towards the price of rebuilding a life. Andrews is aware of this truth all too effectively.
On the night time of Jan. 7, 2025, Andrews heard concerning the Palisades hearth from a buddy who noticed plumes of smoke encroaching on Tahitian Terrace, a historic neighborhood of cell properties in Pacific Palisades the place Andrews had been residing for near a 12 months. Andrews solely had time to seize her passport and her two grey Bedlington terriers, Cooper and Coco, earlier than she fled.
All the pieces else, together with her artwork assortment with works by Peter Shire, Jim Shaw, Rashid Johnson and Lesley Vance, was misplaced to the flames.
“So many of them were tokens of friendships that can’t ever be replaced,” Andrews mentioned. “Artists have since given me works, which has been very touching, but the situation has changed my attachment to things, now that I see how transient they can be.”
Artist Kathryn Andrews began a mutual help fund to assist victims of final 12 months’s L.A. County fires, elevating $1.74 million.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Instances)
Andrews moved 4 occasions earlier than settling into her present house in West Hollywood. The instability made it almost inconceivable to create new work.
“When I make art, I have to take risks of all kinds, creatively, emotionally, financially,” she mentioned. “And when you’re in a chaotic state, and you’re dealing with so much loss, it’s very hard to subject yourself to more risk.”
Managing the logistics of displacement is additional sophisticated by countless paperwork, insurance coverage claims, Federal Emergency Administration Company varieties and the exhaustion of grief.
“It’s not something that happens, then it’s over, and you’re back to normal,” she mentioned. “It transforms you and makes you double-think a lot.”
A lot of the general public discourse surrounding disasters corresponding to final 12 months’s fires focuses on blame, however Andrews considers that framing incomplete.
“We’re all caught inside systems built around us by big business and government, systems that we don’t understand, let alone control,” she mentioned. “And in our daily lives, we participate in them. We contribute to what will ultimately lead to our own destruction, whether that’s over-consumption or climate change.”
The one selection, as Andrews sees it, is to take accountability, reclaim company and collectively reimagine the way to reside.
I first met Andrews at her downtown studio on the highest ground of the Reef constructing in South L.A. a number of days after the anniversary of the Palisades hearth. Moveable partitions divide the large area: the entrance homes the Judith Middle, the gender equality nonprofit that Andrews launched in 2024, whereas the again serves as her workplace, studio and archive. Cabinets crammed with colourful books line the partitions. Cooper and Coco greet me on the door, then settle beside Andrews.
In a fuchsia sweater, flowy cheetah-print skirt, and cobalt-colored glasses that intensify her blue eyes, Andrews tasks a shocking equanimity contemplating all she’s endured within the final 5 years. Nonetheless, as we start to speak, I come to grasp one other side of her resilience.
Alongside together with her work as an artist and advocate, Andrews can also be a therapist. The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, mixed with the lack of her first place in September, 2020, catalyzed Andrews’ choice to return to high school—however the pivot adopted a lifelong curiosity in cycles of trauma and violence. Andrews graduated Antioch College in 2023 and has been working towards ever since.
“We’re so caught up in our lives and the systems we make for ourselves,” Andrews mentioned. “When everything’s gone, you have this opportunity to question why you did certain things, and why you held onto others. You can invite in the new.”
For her, that meant reassessing what she most valued, and stepping again from the near-constant rotation of museum and gallery exhibitions. She turned her consideration towards two of her most deeply held pursuits, which had sharpened in focus after the Palisades hearth: community-oriented work, and the pervasive drawback of sexism in American tradition.
She started taking motion towards the latter in 2024 when she based the Judith Middle, which hosts exhibitions, public conversations, e book golf equipment and poetry readings that look at how sexism operates throughout interconnected methods within the arts, politics, science, schooling and know-how. Upcoming programming features a dialog with the legendary efficiency artist Barbara T. Smith, and a panel led by a Ukrainian curator on conflict pictures.
Related considerations animate Andrews’ sculpture apply, which she’s returned to now that her life has regained equilibrium. For greater than twenty years, she’s examined the methods objects and pictures form our notion of ourselves and others.
In current works, she solid the Oscar statuette as a phallic image of gendered authority and exclusion; embedded half 1,000,000 {dollars} in U.S. foreign money inside a chrome steel sculpture formed like breasts; and exhibited the names of each girl who has run for president and misplaced in site-specific installations, most not too long ago on the Institute of Up to date Artwork Los Angeles in 2024.
Kathryn Andrews’ “Accession, 2023.”
(Kathryn Andrews / David Kordansky Gallery)
Her art-making, organizing work and remedy apply are all linked and striving towards the identical objective, Andrews mentioned.
Once I requested her what that is perhaps, she laughed and mentioned, “Sanity.”
“I think everything I’m doing is really about questioning the way we individually and collectively see things,” she mentioned.
A 12 months out from the Palisades hearth, when folks discuss restoration and returning to the best way issues had been, Andrews factors them in the other way, towards addressing the challenges forward. The fires, the floods, the cascading disasters, aren’t aberrations we’ll overcome and transfer previous, however relatively the circumstances below which we now reside, she mentioned.
“We need a greater collective sense of these ongoing calamities as the new normal,” she mentioned.
The query now will not be the way to rebuild what was misplaced, however what new fashions of artwork and neighborhood may emerge of their place.
