I think being an artist requires fortitude on multiple levels– surviving and thriving in a world that typically values products over visions, and monetary gain over spiritual growth.

I have a very recent story of resilience… On January 31st 2024, while I was traveling with family in Senegal, my home and studio burned. A fire which had started in a neighbor’s yard crossed the fence to our duplex apartment building. Luckily nobody was home, but my upstairs neighbors lost their beloved cat. Downstairs, much of my thirty-year inventory of artworks, which I had carefully stored in my back bedroom, and my personal belongings, were destroyed by fire, smoke, and water.

What had started as a tragedy, however, has become a story of community, support, and resilience.

Soon after the fire, torrential rains started in Los Angeles. People gathered to help me pull what we could save from the apartment, and remove artwork from piles in the yard where the firemen had tossed things from the burning building. The first week I slept on a friend’s couch in the neighborhood, and another college friend came down from SF to help.

After experiencing a trauma like this, your brain is scattered, and it can be confusing and even overwhelming to prioritize tasks. In the days that followed, more friends, neighbors, and my Aunt helped me move my remaining belongings into a Uhaul, then a storage unit, and other friends visited from out of town to help me move into a temporary air b+b, and a studio space, where I began salvaging work.

Art friends all over the city spread out my charred notebooks and wet works on paper to dry them in their studios, placing paper towels between the book pages, and drying them with fans and hairdryers, returning them to me weeks later.

Going through what people have saved for me has been the greatest gift. When this all happened, it was such a chaotic moment- that I did not even know what I had that had survived the fire. So, each piece that has been salvaged is a huge relief, a memory remembered, an act of labor and love restored.

How does one maintain optimism through a period of tragedy and loss? Much of it has to do with community- feeling seen, heard, and supported. Even though I have gone through something unimaginable to most, I have not felt alone through any of it. At a recent group show about work made by fire at Bermudez Projects in LA, we spoke about resilience and loss. I believe it can be in community that we help to heal each other.

The other half of the story, which is less shared, is about daily practice, meditation, acts of kindness to oneself and others, and marking the moments through the process of writing and art. I have just started making new work in my new studio. The walls and floors are mostly dedicated to sorting through damaged work, but there are seeds sprouting in the rubble. I am, after all, not just what I have done already, but what I am doing now– and what I will do in the future.