In the raw, early weeks after the Eaton Fire, like many locals, I kept seeking the smallest signs of the familiar, of regeneration, some fragment of the old Altadena life. Early in March, my harbinger took the form of a tall silhouette, standing beneath the broad canopy of a spruce tree, an easel set up nearby. That silhouette belonged to Keni “Arts” Davis, the painter, whom I often caught glimpses of in Altadena as I crossed errands off my list. He was a fixture to me, now dutifully documenting a singed structure that had been an Aldi’s supermarket. What had initially caught my eye is most likely what had caught his own: a billboard-size sign set up in front of the building’s bottom quarter. It featured an image of a child reaching upward as they attempted to affix a supersized bandage atop big block letters that implored: “Heal.”
Happening upon Davis, with his paper and paints, was a bittersweet symbol. It firmly confirmed that I was indeed “home” but picked at the question, What was home now—when what had been was no longer?
Some weeks later, as I crossed the threshold into the exhibition Ode to ’Dena: Black Artistic Legacies of Altadena, now on view through October 12 at the California African American Museum (CAAM), once again that bittersweet feeling spread through me. I’m home. I’m in the right place. Davis’s watercolors, from his series Beauty for Ashes—prefire and postfire watercolor renderings of Altadena streetscapes—were some of the first pieces to greet me.
Within the same vestibule, my eyes were pulled to an expansive collage of snapshots—the images so spirited that, taken together, they played an aural trick: I heard laughter, buzzing conversation, a rousing round of “Happy Birthday.” Another familiar face popped through—the regal profile of the late esteemed activist and artist John Outterbridge, a longtime Altadena resident, gazing just out of frame. “I wanted a mix of well-known artists plus regular people from Altadena. You know, someone’s, like, cool mom, cool dad,” independent curator Dominique Clayton—who assembled the show alongside Larry Earl, Kenturah Davis, Arianne Edmonds, Dylan Joyner, and V. Joy Simmons—tells me later. “Especially since people have lost photo albums, hard drives. They’ve lost millions of memories.”
There’s an intimacy and authority of place—of life—that energizes the show. Ode to ’Dena showcases over two dozen artists of varying disciplines who have been in some way touched or shaped by the community. They may be first-generation natives, or sprout from deep multigenerational family roots; they may have touched down for a few seasons, or maybe one summer that changed them forever; or perhaps they were inspired by Altadena’s idiosyncratic beauty and distinct rhythm of life.
Conceived in the early days after the sweeping fires, the show opened just three months later, a challenge, Clayton says, she was more than up for. With a background in film and television production, she was familiar with quick turnarounds. So when CAAM’s executive director, Cameron Shaw, approached with the idea, Clayton recalls, she knew whom to approach. “The whole staff of CAAM, the board members, all the artists, their family members, really just answered every single one of my calls, made themselves available, opened up the doors,” Clayton says. “This is why I like to say this show is ‘community-curated.’”
While Clayton was open to different possibilities for how the show might organically come together, she knew outright that she was not going to focus on the spectacle of disaster: “We already saw that on CNN.” Instead, she says, a sense of focused purpose was of utmost importance: “How, as a Black cultural institution, could we be responsive to an event that had impacted so many Black cultural figures.” The curators considered artists with work in the museum’s permanent collection, “obvious go-tos” like Outterbridge, Charles White, and Betye Saar (who grew up in North Pasadena).
In addition to highlighting Altadena elders and major culture bearers, Clayton wanted to convey an intergenerational throughline: “How do we connect the dots and who is part of their world?” With the enormity of erasure, Clayton wanted to convey the granular: “Who did this work? How did Altadena become Black?”
To this end, wall text illuminates the artists’ connection to place as well as the provenance of the work itself. Dominique Moody’s evocative memory palace A Family Treasure Found (2002) had been for a time stored away in a barn at the artist-owned Zorthian Ranch in Altadena while she was residing there. Even then, in the mid-2010s, says Moody, “We had some of those intense weather situations. Horizontal rain that came right to the back wall of that barn. I’d have to come in...and try to tarp everything.”
Sam Pace’s poignant From the Ashes, a mixed-media assemblage piece, is, too, an homage to place and its indomitable creative spirit. It’s an offering fashioned from found objects—a singed tree branch, a burnt flügelhorn—that Pace salvaged from his neighbors’ adjacent properties.
“Everything feels normal until you go outside [the house], then it hits you,” says Pace, whose deep Altadena and Pasadena roots date to 1887. His house, he tells me, is one of a handful of standing structures left on his once-lively, tight-knit block. “All my landmarks are gone. Sometimes I drive right past my street.”
What he’s lost, and what’s to come, is impossible to put into words. “[Altadena] was like a hidden oasis for culture,” Pace says. “I can’t imagine living anywhere else and getting this same vibe. To me it was perfect, because there were artists.”
Notebook in hand, midsummer, I meet up formally with Keni Davis, a block or so from where I’d spotted him in late winter on Lake Avenue in Altadena. The burn scar across the mountains is still evident but slowly healing. He’s set up under a tree on a parking lot’s blacktop with his paints and brushes. I’m curious about precisely what he sees, beyond the wreckage. Plucking a fountain pen from a pouch, he begins to sketch out the fire debris pile across the street. As he works, he reanimates what was once there: “I used to go to the Dutch Bakery and talk to Mr. Davis, and then I would sit and paint,” he says as he gestures toward textures and jagged shapes. “Then there was Rhythms of the Village next door.... You know, I had pretty much all the African clothing I needed, but I would peek in and say hi.”
The night of the fire, says Davis, he was able to salvage only some of the small paintings that are now in the CAAM show. Since the fire, he’s completed about 40 more, documenting the changed landscape. The exhibition, says Davis, “is about the attention Altadena needs now. We need people not to forget us.”
A woman named Brenda, recognizing Davis, gently breaks in to say that she saw his paintings on view at the Altadena Library and that they cheered her spirits. A man driving perilously close to Davis’s tripod-easel asks if he might be a contractor—perhaps mistaking the setup as surveyors’ equipment. Davis shakes his head. Talk swiftly turns to enterprise; the driver is in the business of modular homes, and Davis’s interest is piqued. Set on rebuilding, he’s been keeping up with alternative plans, structures, and materials. He listens as he brushes in his scene’s details. They exchange contacts. When he pulls away, Davis flashes a smile. “That man? I love what he’s doing. Because this is what we have to do now. You’ve got to be creative. We’ve got to be creative.”•
ODE TO ’DENA: BLACK ARTISTIC LEGACIES OF ALTADENA
April 15–October 12, 2025
California African American Museum
600 State Dr., Exposition Park, Los Angeles
Lynell George is an award-winning Los Angeles–based journalist and essayist. She has been a staff writer for both L.A. Weekly and the Los Angeles Times. Her work has appeared in various news outlets including the New York Times; Smithsonian; Vibe; Boom: A Journal of California Preservation; Sierra; Essence; and Ms. She was selected to be a University of Southern California Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism fellow in 2013 and received the Huntington Library’s Alan Jutzi Fellowship for her studies of California writer Octavia E. Butler in 2017. She is the recipient of a 2017 Grammy Award for her liner notes for Otis Redding Live at the Whisky A Go Go. George is the author of three books of nonfiction: No Crystal Stair: African Americans in the City of Angels (Verso/Doubleday); After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame (Angel City Press); and her most recent book, A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler (Angel City Press), published in 2020, which was a Hugo Award finalist in the Best Related Work category in 2021.
