One week into 2025 and I am playing catch up here in this newsletter space and processing the things I saw, read, and listened to nearing the end of 2024. Much of what I took in has my brain swirling around the idea of Identity. The more I think about Identity the more abstract the concept becomes. Over the next few newsletters I am going to attempt to focus on one of the items each week that has my brain churning. All of the items interweave and are knotted together in my brain so likely it will be a mess of foregrounding and cumulative building while I try to parse the various threads and weave them into some sense.
I wrote the above paragraph Monday January 6th. I had planned to start this new year getting back on track with posting this newsletter weekly. I also picked up a couple of broad “goals” from an aquabus captain on a trip to Vancouver in late December. She very firmly told me “I don’t do resolutions,” and then offered up these gems for the new year: “Seek more joy. Seek more interesting things and experiences to escape the mundane. Be a bit more organized but who am I kidding.”
Looking ahead to 2025 it’s clear that this year will require extreme flexibility, quick pivots, and aggressively being for the people, for our communities, and for all. My thoughts here are shaped by the instability around the world, politics, mass misinformation and the dearth of reliable, straightforward news that is free of the endless and often obfuscating hot takes. Additionally, the increasing inequality, and unequal, unjust application of laws and of resources, and constant climate disasters. These issues will certainly be heightened and newly created beginning January 21st by the horror show of incoming United States administration. A lot of the build up to the inauguration is concerning but when Trump takes power it will surely be none stop shocks and horrors. I thought we had a few weeks of 2025 before the major disruptions of chaos arrived but then came January 7th.
It was my 19th wedding anniversary. Jay and I had made no plans. Perhaps this is common for people who have been married nearing two decades? Next year for our 20th we told ourselves we will come up with a celebratory plan. Sipping my morning coffee I suggested we could take a sunset run together up the Santa Monica beach path to Will Rogers. Yes, we agreed that would be nice!
Not long after I noticed wind rustling the palm trees and wondered if a run would be any fun. And then a huge bloom of smoke appeared making its way towards the ocean. It did not take long to learn a fire had broken out in Pacific Palisades and that all of L.A. was on a weather alert for high winds. So, we weren’t taking that run. Instead we spent the afternoon getting food and water to be prepared for our worse case scenario, losing power and being stuck in our apartment. It’s crazy how quickly things shift.
San Vicente is a road near the north border of Santa Monica. It is communally imagined as a fire border. A line that wildfires in the mountains to the North will not cross. I watched in horror and disbelief as the fire tore through and decimated Pacific Palisades. Over a period of 24 hours that entire community was gone. By Tuesday night Will Rogers Beach had burned and evacuation warnings were on the south side of San Vicente. By Wednesday afternoon those warnings turned to orders. New lines for evacuation warnings were drawn. Our apartment bordered the outside edge. Jay’s mom’s apartment the inside edge. If there was a potential for fire to be at my front door I was not waiting to flee in panic and gridlock traffic. We started packing and making a plan. Were we being cautious? Yes. Were we all happy to escape the smoke (was it really an AQI of 226?) and be farther from danger? Yes.
We booked 2 nights in a hotel in Irvine, CA and headed South. More fires broke out, more chaos, more devastation and loss, many many more thousands of acres consumed in the Palisades and Eaton fires. Wednesday we searched VRBO and watched the website melt, unable to keep pace with demand. We found a condo in Solana Beach, San Diego via Airbnb. We booked the week hoping to find some solace in consistency.
It is now Monday the 13th. Santa Monica has lifted evacuation mandates. The warnings have shrunk. And the fire has not crossed that San Vicente border. We are back on high wind alerts until Wednesday evening on the 15th. We hold our breath, thankful our city of Santa Monica has been spared while sitting with the unimaginable images we’ve consumed, unable to process, unable to grasp at what it possibly means for Los Angeles to move forward. What it means for the thousands of inhabitants that have lost so much and who can’t go back home.
While the fires burned Tuesday I saw this quote posted on social media:
It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself. Nathaniel West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust, and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end. Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.
—Joan Didion “The Santa Anas” Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1969.
This essay brought my imagination back to the topic of Identity and broadened the concept. How does one understand the identity of place? And how does place inform the identity of self? And how do all those selves in community combine to create regional identity? I do not know but surely Identity is a complex of several factors. Individual, community, location, experience, imagination, facts, thoughts, perceptions to name a few. We are shaped through our experiences so a landscape, the weather, must be part of who we are, what we potentially can become. Just as landscape shapes the potential of what a city can and cannot be.
The violence and unpredictability of the Santa Ana winds upended my more specific plans for the new year a mere week in. I slipped posting this newsletter last week and I have not painted or even doodled since the 6th. I’m going to take my own advice and do my best to be flexible, pivot, and shift, and to also continue to show up where and when I can. In all this chaos I have found joy every day. There is breathtaking beauty all around us that takes only a moment of noticing to experience. There is no doubt that I have escaped the mundane this past week! I have even tried to seek out interesting things.
Listed below are the items that have twisted up my brain around the idea of identity and that I hope to write more about in future newsletters:
• “The Painted Protest” an essay by Dean Kissick for Harpers December 2024 magazine in which Kissick argues and tantrums over his assessment that the art world has become singularly about the politics of identity which is creating art shows of bad and unnecessary art.
• “Between the Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s-80s” An art exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery of Cold War era artists navigating identity between public and private spaces while being under surveillance. (On view through April 21, 2025. Previously exhibited at the Walker Art Center Nov 2023-March 2024 and the Phoenix Art Museum April 2024-Sept 2024)
• “Get the Picture” A book by Bianca Bosker in which Bosker seeks out the inner workings of the elusive and exclusive art world.
• “Doppelganger” (free book chapters here) A book by Naomi Klein which tries to make sense of the the last 8 years using the concept of her doppelganger, Naomi Wolfe, the increasingly unhinged, conspiracy theorist, and author that the internet and media often confuse with Naomi Klein.
And now I also have an urge to revisit Joan Didion, and read both books Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which includes “The Santa Anas,” as well as “Where I Was From,” a book in which Didion tracks both her family history along side Californian history.
Postcard shows:
Brassworks Gallery is continuing their 2nd annual postcard show online via their website. The show is no longer installed in the gallery. Here are my watercolors
I have a postcard included in this year’s Visual AIDS annual Postcards from the Edge benefit. Preview opens Friday January 24th, sales start Saturday 25th at 10 AM
Resources:
LA Arts Community Fire Relief Fund This is an emergency relief fund for artists and arts workers in all disciplines who have lost residences, studios, or livelihoods or have otherwise been impacted by the devastating Los Angeles fires in January 2025. Gifts to the fund may be made through the Getty’s website. The fund will be administered by the Center for Cultural Innovation, a longstanding intermediary providing funding, advocacy, and research support on behalf of individuals in the arts. Beginning Monday, January 20, 2025, artists and arts workers who have been impacted by the fires can visit the CCI website to apply for emergency funding.
Center for Cultural Innovation
Center for Cultural Innovation Emergency Resources for Artists & Freelancers a google doc with resources and emergency funds for artists.
Vote Save America has created a disaster relief fund for the L.A. fires tax deductible donations are currently split between the below non-profits that VSA has vetted for maximum impact:
Latino Community Foundation
Los Angeles Regional Food Bank
Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation
United Way of Greater Los Angeles
California Community Foundation Wildfire Relief Fund
Inclusive Action for the City