Tuesday, January 6, 2026

At John Muir High School, a Community Scattered by Fire Will Gather to Make Art

When the Eaton Fire swept through Altadena and Pasadena on January 7, 2025, John Muir High School’s buildings were spared. Its community was not. Approximately 175 students and 16 to 18 staff members lost their homes, according to verified reports, leaving the school intact but its population scattered.

One year later, on the fire’s first anniversary, the school will host a community art gathering intended to bring some of those scattered residents back together. The event, scheduled for 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. on Wednesday, January 7, 2026, is free and open to all.

The gathering is organized by Cynthia Lake, a retired studio arts instructor who taught at John Muir for 31 years and is a 1971 graduate of the school. She will be joined by Side Street Projects, a mobile artist-run nonprofit founded in 1992, and the John Muir High School Alumni Association, which established an emergency donation fund for faculty, students, and alumni who lost homes in the fire.

The event will feature art-making activities, music performances, storytelling, and what organizers describe as community resources for those still navigating recovery. Lake will also launch what she calls the “Eaton Fire Bowl Series”—handmade ceramic bowls she plans to distribute free to individuals impacted by the fire. Lake, whose teaching specialty was ceramics and studio arts, has described each bowl as intended to serve as a “symbol of hope and comfort” for survivors.

The fire, which ignited in Eaton Canyon at approximately 6:10 p.m. on January 7, 2025, burned for 24 days and ultimately killed 19 people, destroyed 9,414 structures, and damaged more than 1,000 additional buildings. John Muir High School, located at 1905 Lincoln Avenue in Pasadena, sits immediately adjacent to Altadena, the unincorporated community that bore the fire’s most concentrated destruction.

The school itself closed for more than three weeks following the fire. When it reopened at the end of January 2025 after environmental testing confirmed no air contaminants from wildfire debris, students described the atmosphere as “very somber.” Many classmates were missing, scattered across the region.

Heavyn Harmon, who was senior class president at the time of the fire, lost her family’s home of 57 years. In the months after, she described conversations with classmates in which “a lot of people” were “crying, experiencing the anger, the confusion.” She graduated early and moved to Texas. “The only way we’re kind of getting through it is being with each other and speaking to each other,” Harmon said, “because we all have an understanding of the pain that we’re going through.”

One year after the fire, 80 percent of fire survivors remain without permanent housing, according to recovery assessments. The anniversary gathering at John Muir is one of several events scheduled across Pasadena and Altadena on January 7, including a community commemoration at 5:00 p.m. in the Grocery Outlet parking lot on Lake Avenue and a concert at 6:30 p.m. at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium featuring Jackson Browne, Mandy Moore, and Dawes, hosted by John C. Reilly to benefit the Altadena Builds Back Foundation.

Lake, the organizer, spent more than three decades in the classroom where she will now host a community in grief. She received a Pasadena Community Foundation Giesen Grant for her work bolstering the school’s studio arts program. During the 2020 pandemic, she created chalk art on Pasadena sidewalks to support artists who had been sidelined.

Side Street Projects, her co-organizer, operates converted school buses as mobile woodworking workshops and serves more than 10,000 adult artists and 2,500 to 3,000 children annually. The organization received a National Endowment for the Arts “Our Town” Grant in partnership with the City of Pasadena.

John Muir High School, originally opened in 1926 as Pasadena’s second high school, has long served students from Altadena neighborhoods north of campus.

Many of the 175 students who lost homes lived in an unincorporated area that became, by the 1980s, California’s first integrated middle-class Black community. Before the fire, Black homeownership in Altadena exceeded 80 percent—nearly double the national average for Black Americans.

A UCLA study published in late January 2025 found that 61 percent of Black households in Altadena were located within the Eaton Fire perimeter, and 48 percent were destroyed or sustained major damage—compared with 37 percent of non-Black households. Fifty-seven percent of Black homeowners in the area are over age 65, the study noted, leaving them vulnerable to incomplete insurance coverage and financial scams during rebuilding.

At the January 7 gathering, Lake will offer what she has made: bowls, shaped by hand from clay, for people to carry home.