SUPPORT FOR LA ARTISTS
JANUARY 2025
With over 10,000 structures lost and 10 lives tragically claimed thus far, the Los Angeles wildfires last week are among the most devastating in the city’s history. Among those affected are countless artists and art workers who have seen their homes, studios, and businesses destroyed. Fires continue to burn, the risk of damage still remains, and many are still unsure of the state of the neighborhoods they’ll return to.
Our hearts are with the people of Los Angeles and the surrounding areas as they face the devastating impact of these ongoing wildfires. As an art professional with roots in LA, we feel a deep connection to the community and are saddened by the loss and hardship so many are experiencing.
To our friends, clients, and colleagues in Los Angeles, please know that we are thinking of you and send so much love and strength during this difficult time. As the city looks to rebuild, following are some links to fundraisers for individual artists and institutions that have surfaced to assist the Los Angeles art world. Please reach out if you are so inclined....
ALEC EGAN
Alec Egan’s oil paintings of quiet, cockeyed scenes lead viewers to the razor’s edge of idylls. Saturated sunsets, crashing waves, or clean bright bedrooms are subtly askew and hauntingly deserted; human narrative is inserted through architectural elements such as windows, apartment buildings, or parking lots. Egan’s approach to beauty is expressed through conflicting and layered wallpapers, fabrics, flowers, and foodstuffs. Egan’s humdrum daily settings are a colorful feast of dense pattern and thick impasto, whose mysteries yield through prolonged looking.
Alec Egan is one of many who lost his home and studio. He was in the final days of completing works for his upcoming solo show, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘵, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘦𝘢, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘬𝘺, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘢𝘳𝘬, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘴, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘵𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘳, set to open at the end of January. All of the works were burned in the fire. To support Alec and his family, posters are being sold from his 2022 solo show Look Out in an online shop. 100% of the proceeds will go to the artist.
ORDER A POSTER
KATHRYN ANDREWS
Kathryn Andrews received a BA from Duke University and an MFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena. Andrews’s work is based on sources from mass media culture and art history, which investigate the modes of appeal and attraction elicited by the real mythologies of both Hollywood cinema and political campaigns. Her installations have included circus tents and carnival attractions, which invite viewers to interact with her works, giving rise to playful engagements that reveal the powerful magnetism that everyday imagery and objects hold over us.
Andrews also runs a nonprofit, The Judith Center, which helps to organize art commissions, exhibitions, talks and events in collaboration with activists, scientists, artists and politicians. They partner with university art museums and nonprofits to present programming to a range of audiences. Their projects respond to critical contemporary situations and unearth the histories that have shaped them.
This is her second recent fire experience.
GO FUND ME
RUBY NERI
Ruby Neri draws upon 20th-century West Coast traditions as well as a global catalogue of art historical and anthropological modes. She depicts the human body as a porous instrument of pleasure, terror, and everything in between; this places her within a lineage of recent Los Angeles-based artists that includes Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, while her penchant for hand-driven craft connects her to the Bay Area Figurative and Funk movements. Over the last twenty years, Neri has also been one of the leading figures in the return to ceramics as a contemporary artmaking medium. The vessels that have dominated her production during this period evoke both earthy tactility and psychological intimacy. Her use of sprayed glazes links her ceramics to the street art she produced in the late 1990s as a member of what would become the San Francisco-based Mission School, connecting a contemporary urban art form with the archaic power of pre-historical wall-painting and object-making.
GO FUND ME
CAMILLA TAYLOR
Camilla Taylor is recognized for their monochromatic and intensely introspective works on paper and sculpture, which utilize figurative and architectural forms. Taylor’s artworks reflect the viewer’s internal lives as well as collective issues we experience as a society. An accomplished artist exhibiting in traditional gallery spaces, they also create installations in intimate and unusual locations, such as site-specific works in a swimming pool, desert garden, and other locations.
Raised in Provo, Utah, Taylor attended the University of Utah and received a BFA in 2006, and an MFA from California State University at Long Beach in 2011.
GO FUND ME
JOHN KNUTH
John Knuth’s creative conjurings challenge traditional notions of art making. His paintings force extreme tension between the sacred and the profane, creating stunning works by way of indelicate techniques. Knuth’s mission is to take something traditionally regarded as base and to make it into something magnificent, where the materials feel secondary to the radical result. Knuth’s approach is alchemical. Like an art world diviner, he calls upon the elements, from making burn paintings with distress flares and metallic space blankets to using fly regurgitation to make the most incandescent, shimmering paintings. He has perfected his process using flyspeck, which can be said to fall within the art historical continuum that includes the Pre-Raphaelites’ Mummy Brown or Chris Ofili’s elephant dung.
GO FUND ME
MARK WHALEN
Mark Whalen's versatile and interdisciplinary practice explores sculpture, painting and video with scales ranging from small table-based works to large immersive sculptures. Whalen's maquettes are realised in the digital realm, intentionally without gender or physical body, then fabricated with polyurethane and chrome on cast aluminium and spray-painted. In fluorescent hues, the distinctive and exaggerated facial characteristics and body language are comical, while concurrently shifting under the weight of social anxieties. The resulting figurations are part of an over-arching narrative: each body part belongs to a single fictional protagonist, cumulating to represent the vast spectrum of human emotion.
To help him in this time of need, SAENGER Galería is releasing an exclusive edition of prints through SAENGER Editores. 100% of the proceeds will go directly to the artist.
BUY A PRINT
TARA WALTERS
Tara Walters received her MFA from the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, CA and her BFA in Painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, GA. Tara Walters's ethereal painting practice is informed by a fine blend of psychic retreats, seawater, and spiritualists. Her paintings combine swelling movement and transparency, optical effects that mirror her interest in celestial bodies, prismatic auras, and other sublime and romantic visions. Walters blends paint with the water of the Pacific Ocean. The rebellion of using unprimed canvases allows the softness and gentleness to saturate the canvas and then permeate everyone’s mind, creating surrealistic visions.
GO FUND ME
ZORTHIAN RANCH
Zorthian Ranch is a 45-acre community in the foothills of Altadena founded seven decades ago by the late sculptor and craftsman, Jirayr Zorthian. The ranch, which offered public tours, bills itself as a “natural respite from the city” and has long been popular with intellectuals and artists. Resident artists milk goats and make cheese, and hundreds of notable people (including Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, Charlie Parker, Segovia, Richard Feynman, and many more) have gathered to exchange ideas and celebrate life and times with its erstwhile proprietor, Jirayr.
Jirayr left his legacy, the self-built "Z Ranch", in the hands of Alice and Alan, his children from his second wife, Dabney. Today, the ranch is less like a wasteland of art history, and more like a constant work-in-progress. Jirayr believed that art was not life, but a religion. Jirayr was prolific, creating and building until three months before he died in January 2004. When asked if his father's work has been finished, Alan quickly responds, "No, I really haven't finished his work. It's like Gaudi's 'Sagrada Familia.'" It's a constantly evolving process.
GO FUND ME
KIM MCCARTY
Kim McCarty is known for her nubile and waif-like figurative watercolors in muted hues, which she likens to “blurry afterimages drifting past closed eyelids.” McCarty began working with the medium in 1993, after a fire destroyed her studio and she could no longer find a space with proper ventilation for working with oil paint and became quickly intrigued with watercolor’s transparency, immediacy, and “unforgiving qualities.” She works in a wet-on-wet technique, in which watercolor is applied to a moistened sheet of paper—a technique that allows for very little control over the final image because of the pigment’s tendency to spread. For McCarty, this style corresponds to the longing, loss, and vulnerability embodied in her subjects.
This is the second fire that has destroyed her studio.
Please contact MORGAN LEHMAN GALLERY or DAVID KLEIN GALLERY to purchase artwork.
MARTINE SYMS
The practice of Martine Syms is distinguished by its boundlessness: her subjects flow across media—publishing, moving image, photography, installation, performance and software programming—dissolving the lines between them. Combining her distinct sense of humor with sharp-witted observations and social commentary, the Los Angeles-based artist moves seamlessly between elaborating fictions and a research-based practice.
HELP MARTINE
ANALIA SABAN
Analia Saban dissects and reconfigures traditional notions of painting, often using the medium of paint as the subject itself. Blurring the lines between painting and sculpture, imagery and objecthood, her work frequently includes plays on art historical references and traditions. Paintings expand to sculptural forms and sculptures are presented in two dimensions, using the process of trial and error with new techniques and technology. Her unconventional methods such as unweaving paintings, laser-burning wood and canvas, molding forms in acrylic paint, and weaving paint through linen thread, remain central to her practice as she continues to explore art-making processes and materials in relation to her daily experience. Dealing with issues of fragility, balance, technique and experimentation, Saban's connection with everyday objects is at the forefront of her investigation of tangible materials and the metaphysical properties of artworks.
Please contact SPRUTH MAGERS GALLERY or TANYA BONAKDAR GALLERY to purchase artwork.
OTHER WAYS TO HELP
LA Art World Fire Relief: A mutual aid fund launched on GoFundMe by artists and art workers with the initial goal of raising $500,000. The funds will be distributed to artists and art workers who have experienced full loss or severe damage to their home, studio, or crucial personal property.
Artists’ Fellowship, Inc.: Provides financial assistance to visual artists and their families experiencing an unexpected emergency situation, natural disaster, disability, bereavement, or extreme hardship. The aid is open to active visual artists who can demonstrate that their livelihood is funded through the sale of artworks, including painting, sculpture, drawing, ceramics, installation, photography, and mixed-media.
Artist Material Exchange: A crowdsourced, ongoing document for artists to list materials they have available, as well as materials needed.
Art supply donations: Artist Adam Alessi is accepting donations of art supplies and coordinating to get those supplies to affected artists.