On the walls of the gallery, Keni “Arts” Davis’s watercolors show Altadena before and after the fires. There is a local hardware store, a beloved diner, the quirky local Bunny Museum, which held tens of thousands of rabbit-related items.

Then, in gentle strokes of paint, there is the wreckage of each place: rubble, charred beams, burnt-out cars. Davis labels each of these images “BFA”, beauty from ashes.

Those post-fire ruins are gone now, too: Altadena, a historic Black community in Los Angeles that lost nearly 10,000 structures, including more than 6,000 homes, in January’s Eaton fire, is slowly being prepared for rebuilding.

“Now all the rubble is gone, and it’s just flattened out,” said Dominique Clayton, the curator of Ode to ’Dena: Black Artistic Legacies of Altadena, a long-running exhibit at the California African American Museum. “I’m so glad he painted the before and after. Now those buildings have been demolished.”

Ode to ’Dena aims to capture the rich creative legacy of Altadena, a community that for decades nourished Black artists, performers, writers and activists, from Eldridge Cleaver and Sidney Poitier to Octavia Butler. The small town, nestled in the hills to the north of Los Angeles, offered Black families an early chance at home ownership in a region long defined by racial segregation and redlining.

Locals immediately feared that the gentrification of Altadena would be accelerated by the destruction, and that the pre-fire community would be pushed out and longtime Black residents scattered, while the town was rebuilt for wealthier newcomers.

But Altadena’s close-knit community immediately rallied to prevent this double destruction, drawing on a wide range of allies and supporters. While Donald Trump chose not to visit fire survivors in Altadena, limiting his presidential tour to the destruction in the wealthier Pacific Palisades, organizations such as the NAACP and BET Media raised funds, and multiple arts institutions, including Frieze LA, stepped up to document the effects of the fires and highlight the work of artists who had lost their homes and studios.

The California African American Museum exhibit, which runs through October, is part of this broader effort. The show highlights not only the prominent Black visual artists with connections to Altadena, but also the deep connections among them. Several of the artists have multiple generations of their family in the show, including textile, performance and portraiture artist Kenturah Davis, whose father’s watercolors and mother Mildred “Peggy” Davis’s quilt work are both included. The oldest artist on display, the assemblage artist and printmaker Betye Saar, is 98 years old. The youngest, Kenturah Davis’s son Micah Zuri, is two years old.