Hello, my beloved Los Angeles! 

I’m Carolina A. Miranda, and I’m going to be your pilot for this newsletter. You may remember me from my past life, covering art and culture for the Los Angeles Times. I’m now teaming up with KCRW, a station I was not only raised on but where I’ve served as a long-time commentator and which, back in the day, gave me some of my earliest freelance assignments in LA.

It is a mournful week in which I am landing in your inbox. LA has been ravaged by fire, and the losses —  including the cultural ones — are staggering. But it has been inspiring to watch Angelenos come together to support one another. As LA journalist Anna Merlan recently noted in Mother Jones: “People’s selflessness has been evident even when their homes have been destroyed.” 

In all of this, art has a role. A pair of exhibitions — one that just closed, and another whose opening has been delayed by the Palisades Fire — offer some intriguing lessons about our relationship to our landscape and to fire in particular.

So let’s get into it…

What the Life Web Wants

In September, when I landed at the Getty Center to attend one of the opening exhibitions of PST ART: Art & Science Collide, I could see the Line Fire in San Bernardino in the distance (a phenomenon I described in a piece I wrote about PST for Alta Journal). Now that many of those PST ART exhibitions are coming to a close, there has been more fire to reckon with, at a much closer range. As I write this, both the Getty Center and the Getty Villa — though presently unscathed — remain closed due to the lingering Palisades Fire nearby. 

Many of the 70-plus exhibitions in the Getty-funded PST ART, which focused on the relationship between art and science, zeroed in on climate as a theme. And given our present state, it’s a subject that couldn’t have been more timely. But there are two in particular that are worth turning to at this moment. The first was a sprawling retrospective of the work of California artists Helen and Newton Harrison, organized by the La Jolla Historical Society and displayed over several venues around San Diego and Escondido. The second, Fire Kinship: Southern California Native Ecology and Art, centers on Indigenous fire practices, and was scheduled to open at UCLA’s Fowler Museum earlier this month — but that was delayed by the proximity of the Palisades Fire to the university’s campus. 

Fire Kinship, which is now set to open Wednesday, is a good place to start. The show was conceived by former Fowler archeological collections manager Michael Chavez (who is Tongva) and organized by historians Daisy Ocampo (Caxcan) and Lina Tejeda (Pomo), and it’s a reminder that fires — certain types of fires — are an essential part of Southern California culture and ecology. Fires can be destructive; they can also be a tool.

Controlled burns, as regularly practiced by Indigenous cultures prior to colonization, and now resuscitated across parts of the state, can help prevent the buildup of dead brush, which, over time, have helped stoke the infernos to which we now bear witness. Fire can also stimulate new growth, like the juncus plant used to fabricate baskets. (The image at the top of this newsletter shows a detail of a of a clay pot with basket lid by Summer Herrera — an object whose creation relies on fire.) It also plays an important role in ceremony and ritual. “Fire,” says Ocampo, “is our relative and something that can be worked on and navigated.” Adds Tejeda: “California should always be burning in this smaller scale way.”

Marlene' Dusek manages a sumac gathering area with a controlled burn, from Fire Kinship at the Fowler Museum. (Kim Avalos)

The exhibition, which brings together commissioned works by contemporary Indigenous artists as well as a range of historical objects and ephemera, was organized in consultation with Indigenous community leaders around Southern California. It will also include artist talks and film screenings, as well as nature walks in the UCLA Botanical Gardens. Its themes have already emerged as significant in these fires: on Sunday, The Times reported that a Tongva property in Altadena burned — but that traditional stewardship practices helped lessen the damage.

Where Fire Kinship is focused on Indigenous approaches to fire, Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work — which closed last weekend — focused on the approaches of two pioneering eco-activist artists whose work around landscape degradation and climate change has proven prophetic. 

Inspired by Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s 1962 treatise on the environmental damage wrought by DDT, the Harrisons (who were married) decided to only make work in service of the environment. This included actions that were small in scale — like making a small mound of soil. But they also undertook ambitious projects that considered vast areas of land, such as the series of works from the early ‘90s that examined the ways in which activities like clear-cutting had imperiled a network of watersheds in the Sierra Nevada. The Harrisons, who taught for many years at UC San Diego, didn’t think at the scale of a single plot of land, but of entire regions. “Their work,” says the retrospective’s curator, Tatiana Sizonenko, “invites people to engage with the landscape and with big questions around it.”

Some of their projects were speculative in nature, like their ‘70s-era “Lagoon Cycle,” which was first imagined as a prototype aquatic farming tank that could help supply crabs for food, but then evolved into a broader conceptual piece about how humans manipulate their environment for survival. But other works by the couple have been put into practice, like their design concept for the area around the Devil’s Gate Dam in Pasadena, commissioned by the now-defunct Baxter Art Gallery at Caltech in the 1980s. Once a dire combo of concrete and chain link, the Harrisons proposed covering the open spillway with a park and creating riparian habitats for area wildlife. Their plan was eventually executed by master planners Bob Takata and Associates, and the area is now the pleasant Hahamongna Watershed Park.

A floor installation by the Harrisons at the San Diego Public Library Gallery invited visitors to walk
on the Sierra Nevada (Carolina A. Miranda)

Their work can be a lot to digest. I saw all four parts of the retrospective in a single day, and by the end of it, was feeling bleary from studying so many schematic drawings and wall-length texts. But the exhibition’s remarkable catalog offers an opportunity to absorb their poetic writings and spoken word pieces with more leisure. Like this excerpt from “Saving the West,” from 2016:

In many places the West is afire
as drought continues
temperatures rise
species vanish
forests clear cut
work for many lost

Or, if you want to know more about the Harrisons, you could simply take a walk in Santa Monica. One of my favorite public monuments in Los Angeles — “California Wash,” from 1996 — was designed by them. And it is so unobtrusive that, for years, I walked over it without realizing what it was. Located at Pico Boulevard and the Santa Monica boardwalk, it consists of an inlaid mural in the sidewalk that traces the route that rainwater travels from the mountains to the Pacific Ocean. It’s a reminder of the ways in which we remain connected to vast ecosystems that lie many miles away. It’s also a reminder to continuously think about the land that lies just beneath our feet.

Link Drop

• The L.A. Times rounds up efforts being made by LA cultural organizations to offer relief from the fires, including a $12 million emergency fund for artists established by LA museums.
• The Art Angle podcast has an interview with the Getty’s Katherine E. Fleming on how good planning helped the Getty Villa survive the flames.
• Matt Stromberg at Hyperallergic compiles some of the artistic losses in Altadena.
• Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower presciently depicted the climate change we now face. Now the Pasadena bookstore that bears her name has become a mutual aid center for those affected by the Eaton Fire.
• February’s art fairs — including Frieze, the LA Art Show, and Felix — will move forward as planned.
• Need a break from fire? Here’s Orson Welles narrating Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. 
• Kyle McLaclchlan pays tribute to the inimitable David Lynch (who as you may know was very tight with KCRW.)
• I review MOCA’s quirky and eclectic photorealism exhibition. 
• Signing off with Japanese mascots trying to squeeze through tight places.

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