Salvaged artwork rebuilds a father’s legacy

Tami Outterbridge is rescuing her dad’s art after losing his house in the Eaton fire.

- LYNELL GEORGE

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 oftheir own.

I'm used to being a switchboard of sorts — as a journalist, inevitably, word travelsto and throughme. 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 froma 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, Itold them and myself.

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.