For the primary months of this 12 months, gut-wrenching headlines detailed the incalculable loss in Altadena—an unincorporated, traditionally Black neighborhood in Los Angeles County’s San Gabriel Valley—triggered by the Eaton Hearth. However past that devastation, there nonetheless exists a surviving neighborhood of artists, and their resilient creativity is the main target of an exhibition on the California African American Museum (CAAM) in Los Angeles. Organized by impartial curator Dominique Clayton, “Ode to ’Dena: Black Inventive Legacies of Altadena,” makes use of land and reminiscence to middle the vibrance of the generations of Black artists who’ve made Altadena their house.
On the exhibition’s entrance is a mural full of pictures of life in a pre–Eaton Hearth Altadena: Eldridge Cleaver and his household in 1977 at his mom’s house, Rhea Roberts-Johnson and associates at John Muir Excessive College’s promenade of 1999, the outside of the Altadena Feed Retailer on Lincoln Avenue in 2005, Kalito and Carlo St. Juste beside their house’s peach tree in 2022, and different cherished communal moments. Whereas at first look it rings achingly nostalgic, this picture collage grounds the exhibition within the historical past of this place.
Close by, the artwork of three generations of an Altadena household of artists, the Davises, traces one wall. Additional alongside is a gathering of works by artists, from Charles White and Betye Saar to Dominique Moody and Martine Syms, with ties to Altadena’s inventive ecosystem. The exhibition, visceral but heartwarming, gives a strong image of the quiet consolation and ache inside Black American life, depicted by way of the lens of this verdant enclave northeast of downtown LA.
Clayton mentioned the collage gives a way of displaying what fulfilling lives Altadena residents created for themselves, “not a lot the destruction, as a result of we’ve seen sufficient of that on the information,” she mentioned. From civil rights activists to artists and native residents, the mural exhibits that “Altadena was a sanctuary,” and contextualizes what this outer-LA neighborhood meant to so many.
Works by La Monte Westmoreland in “Ode to ’Dena: Black Inventive Legacies of Altadena,” 2025, set up view.
Picture Elon Schoenholz
These networks are prolonged by way of how Clayton organized the present, putting works in a manner that showcased the artists’ connection to one another. Charles White, she mentioned, “is an ancestor of the present however his spirit could be very robust in Altadena.” His works are close to ones by La Monte Westmoreland and John Outterbridge, who “have been actually all associates and followers of one another.” Close by are works by Dominique Moody, whose studio was near Westmoreland’s house.
Clayton additionally needed “Ode to ’Dena” to showcase the complete spectrum of Altadena’s creative contributions, together with not simply visible arts but additionally music, movie, and literature. Certainly one of Altadena’s most notable exports is Octavia Butler; Octavia’s Bookshelf, an Altadena bookstore named in her honor, has loaned studying supplies to the exhibition.
Starting within the Nineteen Forties as a part of the Second Nice Migration, Altadena turned one in every of few locations within the Western United States during which Black households may personal land, which led to the realm growing right into a middle-class neighborhood. Enveloped in its pure environment, Altadena turned a protected haven for Black individuals, significantly artists who discovered the locale to be an limitless supply of renewal and inspiration. Clayton, who organized native responses to help Altadena’s artist neighborhood and protect their creations, believes this atmosphere birthed a inventive renaissance, during which artists have lengthy been in a position to function “from a spot of peace, with a roof over your head and land, house, and nature surrounding you,” she mentioned.
Three works by Liz Crimzon (left) and a video piece by American artist in “Ode to ’Dena: Black Inventive Legacies of Altadena,” 2025, set up view.
Picture Elon Schoenholz
Land is the point of interest for works by American Artist, Liz Crimzon, and Grandfather, whose contributions pay homage to the realm’s peaceable, but unpredictable pure atmosphere. American Artist’s almost 7-minute video The Arroyo Seco (2022), for instance, narrates the pure, Indigenous, and sociological histories of Altadena’s watershed, the place generations of various inhabitants converged and, at occasions, clashed. With Mushroom Understory (2018), Crimzon paints the gorgeous intricacies of untamed fungi discovered alongside the numerous trails within the space.
Grandfather’s 2017 movie, The Sporadic Nature of Self, alternatively, gives a extra emotive depiction, displaying a masked determine curiously and spasmodically traversing the comb, river-lined, and mountainous terrains. This nature-engulfed area, he mentioned of the work, in response to a wall label, formed his artwork, exposing him to “the huge world past my quick purview.”
Keni “Arts” Davis, Triangle Sq., 2018.
Courtesy the artist
Land additionally comes into focus within the context of what has been left behind in once-cherished areas. Watercolors by Keni Davis depict earlier than and after illustrations of Altadena streets and staple companies, whereas an summary rubbing by his daughter, artist Kenturah Davis, titled Altadena (2005), depicts a classic map of Altadena, using pure pigment and embossed with clay mud from her yard. Sam Tempo breathes new life into stays discovered within the ashes in an assemblage piece, aptly titled, From the Ashes (2025), which includes a burnt flugelhorn that partially survived from the flames that engulfed the studio of musician Joel Taylor.
However Clayton, who shortly realized simply how in depth the magnitude of the loss was, determined to not function any works showcasing the fireplace itself, or something that felt too traumatic or “painful to digest on the time,” she mentioned. As an alternative, the chosen items replicate reminiscences of Altadena, manifestations of Black American life, musings on household and neighborhood, and the “Black creative legacies of Altadena,” in myriad methods. One such piece is I Simply Missed Yew (2019) by Christina Quarles, who moved to Altadena six years in the past. The portray’s summary figures, coalescing alongside a stone wall, she mentioned, present an outline of the “paradoxical nature of identification,” which deepened as she made her house in Altadena, a “stunning neighborhood, the place eclecticism, variety, and wonder have raised and impressed generations of artists,” she mentioned.
John Outterbridge, REVIEW/54-Outhouse, 2003 (foreground), set up view, in “Ode to ’Dena: Black Inventive Legacies of Altadena,” 2025.
Picture Elon Schoenholz
For a extra historic perspective on the significance of Altadena, there’s John Outterbridge’s REVIEW/54-Outhouse (2003), a country, segregated outhouse decoupage with mixed-media pictures of Civil Rights period protests. The historical past of Black collectivism within the face of racial discrimination isn’t that distant a historical past, Outterbridge reminds us.
All through the exhibition, Clayton has paired works that supply a cross-generational dialogue. In portraits by Kenturah Davis and Charles White, we see the eye to element paid to the faces of Black sitters. In assemblage works, there’s an delicate genius to the juxtaposition of disparate supplies, like Sula Bermudez-Silverman’s Decadence (2024), an assemblage that includes wooden casket stands, chewed gum, and insect-eaten isomalt sugar and resembling an ironing, or a collaborative set up by Betye Saar and Allison Saar, Home of Gris Gris (1989), which invitations you to step into an eerie picket shed that appears to exist exterior of time altogether.
Two quilts by Mildred “Peggy” Davis hold on the wall in “Ode to ’Dena: Black Inventive Legacies of Altadena,” 2025, set up view.
Picture Elon Schoenholz
Mildred “Peggy” Davis’s quilts and Marcus Leslie Singleton’s oil work encapsulate feel-good nostalgia of Black American pastimes. Davis’s Feathered Star (2008), made of soppy pink cloth during which kaleidoscopic patterns and darker-hued strips are stitched collectively, transports you to the acquainted heat of Black grandmothers’ residing rooms. Singleton’s Razor (2024), alternatively, offers a snapshot of Black adolescence, illustrating younger cousins on the sidewalk exterior their grandmother’s home with scooters, a basketball, and Jordan sneakers in tow. These pairings weave collectively sides of Black creative manufacturing which can be in tune with ancestral methods of being, each wanting again and calling forward—constantly.
These familial lineages are most evident within the exhibition’s centerpieces, Dominique Moody’s A Household Treasure Discovered (2002), consisting of three mosaic-like sculptures assembled from wooden, glass, copper, and ceramics. To this, Moody has added sundry objects: collectible figurines, a reconstructed model, household pictures, maps, outdated china units. This household tree captures total lives, the roads they traveled, and the artifacts they’ve left behind. Behind these sculptures, Moody holds house for her eight siblings, displaying canvases of their honor and one for herself. Every is personalised with their silhouettes, aside from one, left clean as a result of that sibling’s premature demise throughout childhood. On the toes of every silhouette, Moody has supplied a personalised caption; Sibling #4 “Title Unknown’s” caption, for instance, reads, “the one left behind to straddle the fence between two worlds.”
Dominique Moody, A Household Treasure Discovered, 2002, set up view, “Ode to ’Dena: Black Inventive Legacies of Altadena,” 2025, on the California African American Museum.
Picture Elon Schoenholz
Clayton started her analysis for the exhibition, simply weeks after the wildfires had been contained, by wanting by way of CAAM’s everlasting assortment, figuring out artists like White, Saar, and Westmoreland, who had historic connections to Altadena. The guidelines started to develop as Clayton realized of artists who had already begun making new work in response to the fires, both out of their surviving items or wholly new ones. Sourcing work occurred organically through phrase of mouth, with one artist would result in one other artist, as Kenturah Davis did with Capt. James Stovall V who’s displaying his portray entitled Blooming Duality (2024), which particulars two males dealing with reverse instructions with white florals sprouting from their faces. “It was actually [about] who’s obtainable, who can I entry, and the way shortly can it’s achieved,” Clayton mentioned.
“Ode to ’Dena” serves as a container for the collective reminiscence that this enclave holds, which inserts into the museum’s mandate, which CAAM government director Cameron Shaw mentioned, “is to protect Black historical past and tradition—not simply on reflection however within the current. Meaning we now have to behave shortly when our locations and contributions are underneath risk, and we now have to be intentional about which tales get informed and who will get centered. ‘Ode to ’Dena’ is a reminder of what’s at stake.”
