John Outterbridge’s daughter salvages found art from Altadena ruins

Before sunup on Jan. 8, as the Eaton fire roared across the San Gabriel Mountains, a blaze of texts and calls lit up my phone with a ferocity of their own.

I’m used to being a switchboard of sorts — as a journalist, inevitably, word travels to and through me. In those chaotic, early hours, as I haphazardly prepared my own go-bag in my North Pasadena home, I monitored the rising alarm: The major share, I noted, were from a cadre of artists, musicians and writers parsing the news, speculating that the Altadena home and studio of late artist-activist John Outterbridge’s family would have, most certainly, been in the path of those fast flames.

I grew up on the edges of Outterbridge’s remarkable orbit of influence in Southern California’s Black Arts Movement; the potential loss was a staggering thought to process. For now, we were in a vestibule of hope: It was rumor, not fact, I told them and myself.

Tami Outterbridge confers with artists Dominique Moody and Charles Dickson as they help 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 one of those community lions, deeply rooted — ubiquitous, it seemed — always with a generous ear and hand to help. I met him taking art classes at the Watts Towers Arts Center, when it was still located in a whimsical, paint-bombed bungalow. It’s where, as a child, I took my first lessons with “Mr. Tann” — the ceramicist Curtis Tann — also a key player in the movement, and then later sat with Outterbridge himself, watching his hands, observing his patient example.

His work, particularly his multilayered assemblage pieces, pierced something in me, especially as a young Black Angeleno, in the wake of 1965’s Watts uprising and its glowing fury. I was developing my own powers of observation; what’s precious, Outterbridge’s work emphasized, resided in the eye of the beholder. He was gathering bits and pieces considered to be “throwaway,” pulling from a “disaster” but shaping them into something vital and new. It was both reclamation and addendum, metaphors I carried into my future.

That Altadena property would contain a bounty of that work — of correspondence to young artists and colleagues, of photographs, of the echoes of all the lively gatherings he and his wife hosted. It was beyond heartbreak to even think of its demise.

Three days later, from my own evacuation perch, I opened Facebook to find that his daughter, Tami, had posted a sobering confirmation, which read in part:

Hello, FB Family & Friends!

By God’s Grace, my mother Beverly Outterbridge and I are safe! However we have lost our homes! There was no time to grab much, so everything is lost. But, we are here! WE are not lost …

In the weeks following the fire, the Outterbridges didn’t leave my mind: my memories of spotting Outterbridge — or “Bridge,” as he was called — around the city, at art shows or community gatherings I was covering as a staff writer for The Times. He’d cheer me on, sometimes ringing my desk on Spring Street: “Just checking in to see how they’re treating you …”

Surviving “found objects” from John Outterbridge’s Altadena studio, including remnants of a work by the late artist John T. Riddle.

(Michael Garnes)

In early summer, I glimpsed a portrait of Outterbridge hanging in an exhibition I was writing about — his eyes staring, it seemed, through me. A like-old-times nudge I couldn’t ignore. I found a bench just outside the gallery, called Tami to see how she was managing. Her voice was disarmingly vibrant; her words tumbled out in vivid colors, textures. She was assembling a vision. A project had presented itself to her, a way to salvage the archive — or, more precisely, create something altogether new.

In truth, she says, when a neighbor left a message in the early hours of Jan. 8, just hearing his words — “You have lost everything” — knocked the wind out of her. “I sat there in the hotel parking lot with my mother thinking, ‘What does that even mean?’” she says.

It would be several weeks before they could access the property, as the National Guard had restricted access. One of Outterbridge’s oldest friends, the artist and co-founder of the former Brockman Gallery, Dale Davis, promised his support. “He told me, ‘I consider it my responsibility to escort you and your mother back,’” Tami says. He kept his word: “It was beautiful and true to form.”

As painful as it was for Tami to absorb firsthand “all the black, gray and blanch-white,” a germ of an idea took root in those ashes. Watching Davis travel through the site, gathering pieces of metal, shards of ceramics and glass — there were things to salvage, just as her father always had. There was possibility.

Artists Sam Pace, left, and Michael Massenburg discuss possible ways to transform an electrical fixture into “found art,” a specialty of John Outterbridge.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Not long after, while she was working in her corner of the lot, the idea of “Diggin’ Bridge” and its various prongs and phases — from archive-building to a documentary production to exhibition — took hold. The name came first and the rest followed. That image of Davis trawling the wreckage came back: “It occurred to me that I could invite artists who were in the direct line of contact with my father to come to the property and to excavate with me,” she recalls. “Not only would they help me find things, but also they create a piece with what they found that could be a reflection upon … this man that we called ‘Bridge.’”

In the “digging” she stitches together the physical work of excavation, the ‘60s and ‘70s colloquial meaning of “dig” as to “understand” and, lastly, its nod to DJ/crate-digging culture that remixes and reimagines. (Support already locked in: Plain Sight Archive has partnered with them to assist with the creation of the community-sourced archive.)

Artist and longtime friend Stanley C. Wilson sifts through the ashes of John Outterbridge’s property as part of a multipronged project his daughter is calling “Diggin’ Bridge.”

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

To date, she calculates, “I have about 25 artists rockin’ with me.” Among 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.

In the blade-sharp heat of July, I drive north toward the still-visible burn scar, up to the site, replaying Tami’s description of what she’d endured that night: an alarming orange glow filling her entire back window, the neighborhood’s streets full of fire and not one fire truck in sight.

Now, six months later, many of the parcels have been cleared. The Outterbridge lot is still a moonscape. I pull on PPE and head toward the devastating pile, that acrid post-fire odor still evident.

Wading in, I instantly encounter a familiar face, painter Michael Massenburg. Also present are Michael B. Garnes, a photographer and Bridge mentee who has been meticulously documenting the process, and Altadena-based artist Sam Pace, whose Pasadena/Altadena roots reach back to the 1800s. Pace and Massenburg are threading through the tight spaces within the shattered remains of the front house.

“This might be the room where we used to eat dinner,” Massenburg wonders aloud. Sorting through debris, he fishes out rusted metal pieces — some circular, some straight, though bent by heat. “They already look like sculptures on the ground,” he confers with Pace, then pauses, cautioning himself: “Don’t overthink.”

Massenburg carries a sculpture removed from the ashes.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

He hears him, Bridge: the maxims, the strategies. “He was organic and authentic,” he remembers, “From John, I always got a sense of family.” So, in gathering in this way and trusting what makes itself known, “we are not celebrating the art of the artist, but the spirit of the artist.”

Even the rubble will soon vanish; the Army Corps of Engineers has scheduled a firm date for Thursday. Tami has held them off for as long as she can. In this quickly closing window, the artists have worked miracles, unearthing treasures: ceramic pieces by Davis, a metal scrap and bolts from one of her father’s pieces, her mother’s wedding ring, her father’s trademark wire-rimmed spectacles — and miraculously, a remnant of a thought-to-be-long-lost piece by my teacher, Curtis Tann.

There’s peace in laboring together, Garnes tells me: “It feels safe, even joyful to be in community on the property.” Gratitude has begun to edge in where only grief had claimed space.

“I feel like Dad is saying: ‘I have taught you this language. Now speak it,’” Tami reflects, his cadences sounding in her voice. “There’s this language of the discarded thing. The language of transformation and redemption. This all feels very redemptive to me.”