Earlier than sunup on Jan. 8, because the Eaton hearth roared throughout the San Gabriel Mountains, a blaze of texts and calls lit up my telephone with a ferocity of their very own.
I’m used to being a switchboard of kinds — as a journalist, inevitably, phrase travels to and thru me. In these chaotic, early hours, as I haphazardly ready my very own go-bag in my North Pasadena house, I monitored the rising alarm: The key share, I famous, had been from a cadre of artists, musicians and writers parsing the information, speculating that the Altadena house and studio of late artist-activist John Outterbridge’s household would have, most definitely, been within the path of these quick flames.
I grew up on the sides of Outterbridge’s exceptional orbit of affect in Southern California’s Black Arts Motion; the potential loss was a staggering thought to course of. For now, we had been in a vestibule of hope: It was rumor, not truth, I informed them and myself.
Tami Outterbridge confers with artists Dominique Moody and Charles Dickson as they assist her excavate the burned Altadena property of her artist father.
(Michael Garnes)
As an internationally acclaimed artist and educator, Outterbridge, who died in 2020, was a kind of neighborhood lions, deeply rooted — ubiquitous, it appeared — all the time with a beneficiant ear and hand to assist. I met him taking artwork courses on the Watts Towers Arts Middle, when it was nonetheless positioned in a whimsical, paint-bombed bungalow. It’s the place, as a toddler, I took my first classes with “Mr. Tann” — the ceramicist Curtis Tann — additionally a key participant within the motion, after which later sat with Outterbridge himself, watching his palms, observing his affected person instance.
His work, significantly his multilayered assemblage items, pierced one thing in me, particularly as a younger Black Angeleno, within the wake of 1965’s Watts rebellion and its glowing fury. I used to be creating my very own powers of commentary; what’s treasured, Outterbridge’s work emphasised, resided within the eye of the beholder. He was gathering bits and items thought-about to be “throwaway,” pulling from a “catastrophe” however shaping them into one thing very important and new. It was each reclamation and addendum, metaphors I carried into my future.
That Altadena property would comprise a bounty of that work — of correspondence to younger artists and colleagues, of pictures, of the echoes of all of the vigorous gatherings he and his spouse hosted. It was past heartbreak to even consider its demise.
Three days later, from my very own evacuation perch, I opened Fb to seek out that his daughter, Tami, had posted a sobering affirmation, which learn partially:
Howdy, FB Household & Buddies!
By God’s Grace, my mom Beverly Outterbridge and I are protected! Nevertheless now we have misplaced our houses! There was no time to seize a lot, so every little thing is misplaced. However, we’re right here! WE usually are not misplaced …
Within the weeks following the hearth, the Outterbridges didn’t depart my thoughts: my recollections of recognizing Outterbridge — or “Bridge,” as he was referred to as — across the metropolis, at artwork reveals or neighborhood gatherings I used to be protecting as a employees author for The Occasions. He’d cheer me on, typically ringing my desk on Spring Avenue: “Simply checking in to see how they’re treating you …”
Surviving “discovered objects” from John Outterbridge’s Altadena studio, together with remnants of a piece by the late artist John T. Riddle.
(Michael Garnes)
In early summer time, I glimpsed a portrait of Outterbridge hanging in an exhibition I used to be writing about — his eyes staring, it appeared, by me. A like-old-times nudge I couldn’t ignore. I discovered a bench simply outdoors the gallery, referred to as Tami to see how she was managing. Her voice was disarmingly vibrant; her phrases tumbled out in vivid colours, textures. She was assembling a imaginative and prescient. A challenge had offered itself to her, a solution to salvage the archive — or, extra exactly, create one thing altogether new.
In reality, she says, when a neighbor left a message within the early hours of Jan. 8, simply listening to his phrases — “You’ve misplaced every little thing” — knocked the wind out of her. “I sat there within the resort car parking zone with my mom pondering, ‘What does that even imply?’” she says.
It might be a number of weeks earlier than they may entry the property, because the Nationwide Guard had restricted entry. One in all Outterbridge’s oldest mates, the artist and co-founder of the previous Brockman Gallery, Dale Davis, promised his help. “He informed me, ‘I think about it my duty to escort you and your mom again,’” Tami says. He saved his phrase: “It was stunning and true to type.”
As painful because it was for Tami to soak up firsthand “all of the black, grey and blanch-white,” a germ of an concept took root in these ashes. Watching Davis journey by the positioning, gathering items of steel, shards of ceramics and glass — there had been issues to salvage, simply as her father all the time had. There was chance.
Artists Sam Tempo, left, and Michael Massenburg focus on potential methods to rework {an electrical} fixture into “discovered artwork,” a specialty of John Outterbridge.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Occasions)
Not lengthy after, whereas she was working in her nook of the lot, the thought of “Diggin’ Bridge” and its numerous prongs and phases — from archive-building to a documentary manufacturing to exhibition — took maintain. The title got here first and the remaining adopted. That picture of Davis trawling the wreckage got here again: “It occurred to me that I might invite artists who had been within the direct line of contact with my father to come back to the property and to excavate with me,” she remembers. “Not solely would they assist me discover issues, but additionally they create a bit with what they discovered that could possibly be a mirrored image upon … this man that we referred to as ‘Bridge.’”
Within the “digging” she stitches collectively the bodily work of excavation, the ‘60s and ‘70s colloquial which means of “dig” as to “perceive” and, lastly, its nod to DJ/crate-digging tradition that remixes and reimagines. (Help already locked in: Plain Sight Archive has partnered with them to help with the creation of the community-sourced archive.)
Artist and longtime pal Stanley C. Wilson sifts by the ashes of John Outterbridge’s property as a part of a multipronged challenge his daughter is asking “Diggin’ Bridge.”
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Occasions)
So far, she calculates, “I’ve about 25 artists rockin’ with me.” Amongst them: Dominique Moody, John and Connie Trevino, Betye Saar, Charles Dickson, La Monte Westmoreland, Stanley C. Wilson, George Evans and Ben Caldwell, working in shifts, shoulder to shoulder.
Within the blade-sharp warmth of July, I drive north towards the still-visible burn scar, as much as the positioning, replaying Tami’s description of what she’d endured that evening: an alarming orange glow filling her complete again window, the neighborhood’s streets full of fireplace and never one hearth truck in sight.
Now, six months later, most of the parcels have been cleared. The Outterbridge lot remains to be a moonscape. I pull on PPE and head towards the devastating pile, that acrid post-fire odor nonetheless evident.
Wading in, I immediately encounter a well-known face, painter Michael Massenburg. Additionally current are Michael B. Garnes, a photographer and Bridge mentee who has been meticulously documenting the method, and Altadena-based artist Sam Tempo, whose Pasadena/Altadena roots attain again to the 1800s. Tempo and Massenburg are threading by the tight areas throughout the shattered stays of the entrance home.
“This would possibly be the room the place we used to eat dinner,” Massenburg wonders aloud. Sorting by particles, he fishes out rusted steel items — some round, some straight, although bent by warmth. “They already appear like sculptures on the bottom,” he confers with Tempo, then pauses, cautioning himself: “Don’t overthink.”
Massenburg carries a sculpture faraway from the ashes.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Occasions)
He hears him, Bridge: the maxims, the methods. “He was natural and genuine,” he remembers, “From John, I all the time obtained a way of household.” So, in gathering on this means and trusting what makes itself identified, “we’re not celebrating the artwork of the artist, however the spirit of the artist.”
Even the rubble will quickly vanish; the Military Corps of Engineers has scheduled a agency date for Thursday. Tami has held them off for so long as she will. On this rapidly closing window, the artists have labored miracles, unearthing treasures: ceramic items by Davis, a steel scrap and bolts from one in every of her father’s items, her mom’s marriage ceremony ring, her father’s trademark wire-rimmed spectacles — and miraculously, a remnant of a thought-to-be-long-lost piece by my trainer, Curtis Tann.
There’s peace in laboring collectively, Garnes tells me: “It feels protected, even joyful to be in neighborhood on the property.” Gratitude has begun to edge in the place solely grief had claimed house.
“I really feel like Dad is saying: ‘I’ve taught you this language. Now communicate it,’” Tami displays, his cadences sounding in her voice. “There’s this language of the discarded factor. The language of transformation and redemption. This all feels very redemptive to me.”
