Anderson Ranch Arts Center, a nearly 60-year-old nonprofit based in Snowmass Village, welcomes artists from around the world for its artists-in-residence program every year.
Through this program, artists are expected to front some of the costs, but in October and November, the ranch hosted 15 artists that were affected by January’s wildfires in Los Angeles — for free.
Aspen Public Radio’s Regan Mertz spoke with two of these artists in their makeshift studios in Snowmass Village.
Olivia Hill, a painter, talked about how she was affected by the fires, what she worked on while at the ranch and what she’s taking back home with her.
The transcript below has been edited for clarity and length.
Olivia Hill: We moved to L.A. when I was about two-and-a-half, so I grew up in Los Angeles.
I've always been exposed to the arts. I've always made things — as all children do — but I never stopped.
From 2017 to 2020, I was following the artist Enrique Martinez Celaya on social media. I'd become a big fan of his work, and I just happened to see that he was going to be leading the advanced mentorship program here at Anderson Ranch.
Enrique Martinez Celaya (from his visiting lecture): I left physics because I felt like I wanted to be an artist, but I made it because I felt like this is what I needed to do. I come to art, not to apologize, but keeping my mind clear on why I’m doing it … for myself.
Hill: I went over the summer in between years at grad school, and experienced Anderson Ranch for the first time, and found it to just be an incredibly enriching and inspiring place to continue making my work.
I had decided that I would try to come back here at some point either to teach or as a resident.
In between grad school and now, I became a mother, and I now have a four-year-old. So, studio time is pretty spare these days.
And then, the fires.
Korva Coleman (from an NPR Newscast): Good morning. Today is Wednesday, Jan. 8. I’m Korva Coleman from NPR News. There are three large wildfires burning in the Los Angeles area, and they are not under control. The largest is the Palisades fire burning northwest of L.A.
Hill: I've seen fires, but nothing like this before. It felt like a fire storm.
It wasn't out there in the wilderness. It was really like right in our own neighborhood.
My husband and I could see the flames from our backyard, and we just decided, “We can't go to bed. Let's get out of here.”
Then we kind of entered into this ambiguous period for the next few weeks. They didn’t want anybody there. There was looting. We couldn't drink the water.
So, the choice became pretty clear that we would move.
In my case, it was missing a lot of studio time and work time, moving into a more expensive home, and rebuilding a new studio space.
Then this residency opportunity popped up as well, and I applied right away.
It's been very productive and given me a kind of peace of mind and time to think that I haven't had this year.
This is more time to think and concentrate on my work than I've even had in the last few years.
The work that I do, it looks at human intervention in the landscape and human impact on the landscape. And I tend to be drawn to sort of precarious climates and precarious regions, and Los Angeles is one of those.
I hope that what I take with me from the ranch is this sense of inner peace that I have here, and knowing myself, because I have that time to be alone with my thoughts a little bit more.
My working title for this body of work is “Longtime.”
I wanted to tell a story about a slow passage of time — especially in this era where there's a lot of pressure to respond in real time, very quickly — where we tend to experience a lot of amnesia about life-changing events.
This is my way of slowing down and remembering how small even the human era is in planetary time.
Support for this Nonprofit Spotlight series comes from the Aspen Community Foundation.
