Fast Company: Anthony Obi never imagined the night of Jan. 7 would be the last time he’d step inside his safe haven.
The Houston rapper, known professionally as Fat Tony, has lived in the Altadena neighborhood for a year and says he and his neighbors were prepared for heavy winds and perhaps a few days of power outages.
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Losing a home is already devastating, but for artists, it’s so much more—it’s losing years of work, creative spaces, and the tools they need to make a living. I can’t even imagine waking up one day and realizing everything I’ve built, collected, and worked on is just… gone. What really stuck with me was how tight-knit the creative community in LA is. Instead of just mourning their losses, people jumped into action. The fact that Grief and Hope raised almost a million bucks in such a short time is incredible. It shows that people really do care about the arts and the people who make them happen. And honestly, the art scene in LA wouldn’t be the same without these creatives—so this kind of support is super necessary. I also really felt for Joy Wong. She lost her home, her studio, everything—and yet, she’s already thinking about how to get back to work. That kind of resilience is unreal. Same with Fat Tony and Salomón Huerta, who lost archives and years of creative material. That’s the kind of stuff you can’t just buy back. And then there’s the bigger picture—how this could change LA’s art scene. With so many creative spaces destroyed and rents likely to go up, it’s scary to think about how many artists might be pushed out.
Even just among the small subsection of creatives I personally pay attention to I can name so many people who were either displaced by the LA fires or whose homes and artworks suffered major damage because of them. It’s horrible to think about the sheer number of artists who have been affected by this if I can name several just off the top of my head. I was particularly saddened to see that Robert J. Lang, one of the most famous and world-renowned origami artists of our time, lost his studio and all but one of the works inside in the fires. I’ve also been following the experience of Benji Le, an interior/houseplant designer, who lost the house he and his partner had put so much work into. As someone from California, reading about these fires also feels kind of like a bad omen. San Francisco has been due for another major earthquake for like half a century, and it’s not too rare that you can smell the smoke in the air from fires around California. I can’t help but feel that I will probably live to see a disaster of some sort, whether earthquake or fire, come to my hometown.
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