On January 7, the artist Kelly Akashi packed a bag at her house in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Altadena to go stay at the Los Feliz home of a friend, the Château Shatto gallery founder Olivia Barrett. The winds whipping around her home, a historic abode that before her had been inhabited by LA artists Jim Shaw and Marnie Weber, were approaching 100 miles per hour, and they were upsetting her cat. The city had also cut off her power in order to prevent the spread of fires, and she didn’t want to spend the night in the dark and cold.
Akashi—who has long been one of LA’s most beloved artist’s artists, with a fiercely devoted network of friends across age, medium, or gallery affiliation—quickly packed some essentials and family heirlooms, leaving behind the contents of her studio, the entirety of a show set to open at Lisson Gallery later that month. She didn’t want to stay too long, given the risks posed by tree branches flying through the air.
“I was thinking, Everyone’s going to go, ‘Kelly, why were you packing? You got knocked out by a branch, that was so stupid, you were so worried about a potential fire, you weren’t paying attention to the wind,’” Akashi told me this week. “So I just packed up quickly and I started driving.”
As she was leaving, she saw something glowing in the distance and ignored it, determined to make it out of the danger of the winds. A few hours later alerts started coming in on her phone that there was a fire and it was spreading. She heard there was a 10-foot inferno wall coming down her street, and the news had failed to reach some of her neighbors until it was terrifyingly late. She feared for the worst, for her home, and her studio, which contained the bronze sculptures and glass installations for her first show with a new gallery.
Los Feliz, where she was holing up, while safe from the fire, was just 15 miles away from Altadena. Soon enough, like much of the city, it would be engulfed in smoke. At Barrett’s house Akashi decided to face the inevitable.
Exhibition view of Kelly Akashi at Lisson, Gallery Los Angeles, 20 February – 29 March 2025Kelly Akashi, Courtesy Lisson
“We went up to the top floor of the house and we could see the fire,” she said. “And I was like, ‘My house is probably burning right now.’”
A few days later, before the National Guard sealed off the neighborhood, she returned to the house, which she moved into in 2021 after years of shuttling between different pads and studios. There was seemingly nothing left except for her Skutt kiln, which had within it an intact bead of hand-blown glass, protected by the sealed-off iron drum. It at first appeared that the rest of the show had been pinned down under tons of collapsed rubble or outright destroyed. But a few days later, she and a few friends showed up in P100 masks, covered head to toe in organic clothing—“there were burning embers that had been falling out of the sky, and they said anything plastic could melt on my skin,” Akashi explained—and an extraction mandate: recover what they could from the ashes.
“My friend went with me, and he’s crazy. I mean, we were wearing protective gear but he just jumped in my studio,” she said, noting that among the many unknown toxins and hazards were a home’s worth of sharp, rusty nails. “I’m like, ‘What are you doing? Get out,’ and he’s like, ‘Look.’ And he just pulls out two bronzes, the two seedpods that are in the show. I didn’t know if they had melted. I didn’t know how hot the fire had gotten; house fires tend to get to over 1,800 degrees, but it probably didn’t get to even 1,400 at my house.”
We were speaking exactly six weeks after the fires first raged, after rains had put the fires out for good and calmed the city’s nerves—to a degree. But there was still a palpable sense of the fact that batteries, cars, and motorcycles had been incinerated in the blaze and gone…somewhere? It was a little disconcerting to see white specks blanketing my eyelashes when I returned home Tuesday evening.
