Thursday, April 23, 2026

From Ashes to Canvas: Five Artists Bring Eaton Fire Responses to Altadena Panel

[photo credit: Eventbrite]

A set decorator’s collection of 5,400 house keys, a tintype photographer’s mobile darkroom, and an Altadena painter’s gallery show converge in one Friday night discussion

The house keys are piling up. So are the drawings, the photographs printed on thin sheets of metal, and the oil paintings of charred hillsides made in the year since the fire.

On Friday, five artists — each of whom responded to the January 2025 Eaton Fire with a specific, sustained body of work — will gather for a panel discussion titled “Healing, Hope, and Commemoration: Artistic Responses to the Eaton Fire,” hosted by Altadena Heritage at 2606 Madison Ave. in Altadena. The event begins at 7 p.m. and runs until 8:30 p.m. Tickets are available through Eventbrite.

The Eaton Fire started January 7, 2025, and destroyed 9,414 structures in and around Altadena, according to Cal Fire. The community’s artists have spent the 15 months since making work from that loss.

Among those presenting Friday night is Kate Sullivan, an Altadena set decorator who lost her home on Highland Avenue — where she had lived for 25 years — and later realized that the keys to those destroyed homes and businesses should not be thrown away.

“After I tossed it, I thought, wait! We need to save the keys and make a memorial,” Sullivan said, according to the Pasadena Weekly.

What she started as a post on Nextdoor has grown, according to the Keychain Project’s website, into a collection of 5,400 keys from homes and businesses destroyed in the Eaton Fire. The project now envisions a large-scale outdoor memorial called “The Embrace” — a structure visitors can walk into, surrounded by keys — to be placed somewhere in Altadena. On Friday, the project will continue its collection at the event itself; attendees who still have keys from burned properties are invited to bring them.

“A lot of artists lost their homes and as we rebuild, the memorial will go up,” Sullivan said, according to the Pasadena Weekly.

Sullivan is joined on the panel by Nancy Larrew, a Pasadena mixed-media artist who volunteers with the project. “I’m really adamant about getting stories so people don’t forget,” Larrew said, according to the Pasadena Weekly.

Also presenting is Asher Bingham, a Los Angeles-based film editor and portrait artist whose Home Sketching Project started as a single drawing — of her best friend’s Altadena home, destroyed while the friend was out of town for a wedding. She posted it on Instagram.

“I didn’t know how to say sorry sufficiently. So I drew it,” Bingham said, according to NPR.

The response overwhelmed her. She has received more than 1,000 requests and assembled a team of 23 volunteer artists to help fulfill them, drawing homes from Pacific Palisades to Altadena using photographs and, when none exist, Google Street View.

Sunny Mills, a set decorator who lost her own home and art studio in the fire on January 8, 2025, will present her tintype photography project, “Altadena in Ashes.” Using a 19th-century technique that produces one-of-a-kind images on thin metal plates, Mills made more than 400 photographs in the Altadena burn zone from March through July 2025, working from a mobile darkroom she built in the back of her car. She documented individuals, families, and the landscapes of what remained.

Altadena painter Mira Dancy will discuss “Mourning’s Orbit,” a series of oil landscape paintings she made in the year following the fire, based on photographs she took around her Altadena home. The work was exhibited at Night Gallery in Los Angeles, February 21 through April 4, 2026.

“The paintings in this show were made in direct response to witnessing the complete devastation that the Eaton Fire leveled on my community of Altadena,” Dancy said, according to Arte Realizzata.

Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and LACMA. The Altadena landscape paintings represent a departure from her established style — acrylic nudes on plexiglass — in favor of oil landscapes that, according to the Night Gallery press release, allow grief and beauty to exist in close contact.

The fifth panelist, Catherine Hamilton, will present her Eaton Canyon Memory Series.

Following the panel, a selection of artwork from all the presenting artists will be available for purchase. Altadena Heritage, a nonprofit advocacy organization incorporated in 1987, has organized the Smart Talk series as part of its ongoing programming around Altadena’s architectural, environmental, and cultural heritage.

Tickets for the April 24 event are available at eventbrite.com. For key drop-off or questions about the Keychain Project, visit keychainproject.org.