I write this while in Los Angeles, where U.S. Customs and Border Protection are flying Predator B drones (MQ-9 Reapers) overhead. Israel has launched its attacks on Iran.

Closer to home, noncriminal, undocumented adults and children are snatched from homes, businesses, schools, courts and places of worship, some jailed in unapproved detainment camps, some literally disappeared by ICE. A judge has declared the administration’s mobilization of the National Guard against those protesting ICE’s actions in L.A. illegal.

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem proclaimed, “We are staying here to liberate [L.A.] from the socialists and the burdensome leadership this governor and mayor have placed on this country and this city.” When a sitting US Senator questioned this use of military force to displace a democratically elected state government, the very definition of a coup, he was forcibly removed, thrown to the floor and handcuffed. (A Senator, by the way, elected with more votes than 48 of the 53 red states U.S. Senators combined.)

As of today, the Marines are deployed here. A Florida sheriff announces that lawbreaking protesters will be killed. A Big Beautiful Bill threatens to cut off more than 10 million American people from existential support. Hurricane season is upon us, and fire rages in the Columbia Gorge, with hundreds of households under mandatory evacuation orders, as the actual elimination of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is on the horizon.

The issue of safety – from war, from state violence, from racist persecution without recourse, from economic instability, from natural disaster – looms large, not just in the collective consciousness of Americans waking up to the daily news, but also in the subjects chosen by artists affected by the forces listed above. I had the chance to visit three exhibitions that tackle the questions of how to live with oppression, instability, an uncertain future – and the ambivalence of the natural environment as both a refuge and a threat.

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“…the distance between shortened Black lives [from toxicity and climate change] and dead Black places is farther than might be imagined. Black places are parables of the threats of industrialization, technology, and white ideals of progress, and they are parables of adaptation, interdependence, and supportability.”  – Danielle Purifoy The Parable of Black Places. (2021)

The Benton Museum of Art Pomona College presents Black Ecologies in Contemporary American Art, on view through June 29. Works by renowned artists, Dawoud Bey, Alison Saar, and Kara Walker among them, and those of artists less familiar to me, Tony Gleaton, Wardell Milan, depict the relationship between Black people and the environment, urban and rural alike. The impact of climate change on more vulnerable groups, the legacies of plantation slavery, the safety of Black women in particular, are all framed in ways that invite the viewer to question their own stereotyping assumptions.

Black ecology as a field of scientific study investigates the disproportionate environmental and climate hazards that marginalized communities experience and the politics that make them possible. Pollution and waste sites are often the focus, as is the increasing vulnerability to the threats brought by climate change. However, there is also a call for highlighting not just degradation, but positive aspects of Black ecological life as well: forms of resistance and land relations, brought to the attention of the public by artists as well as scientists.

One example is the epistemology of the blues, a musical form that helps to understand the relations between people, land, and survival. Another is the focus on Black food movements, with farming, gardening, and other forms of food provisions increasing self-reliance and the ability to withstand deprivation and maintain traditions. (Ref.) Kara Walker’s work below is a terrific example. The idea, then, is to foreground land relations not just as suffering, but as growth, self-reliance, and making a safer space for oneself.

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She often spoke to falling seeds and said, “Ah hope you fall on soft ground,” because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed. – Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God.

“What is a safe space for you?” was one of the questions posed to more than twenty women living in L.A. by artist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh for her site-specific installation Speaking to Falling Seeds at the California African American Museum (CAAM), on view until August 3, 2025.

The studio-drawn portraits resulting from these conversations were enlarged, and wheat pasted on the walls of the light-filled atrium, embedded in landscapes, archival photographs and with added text.

The exhibition’s title comes from Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, where the protagonist relates to the nature around her and draws on the concept of community that nurtures the individual. As Fazlalizadeh states, “Speaking to Falling Seeds” reflects on these Black women’s gathering of natural environments around them, “as if nature is a blanket that warms, shields, and protects them.”

I was very much reminded of the experiential descriptions and philosophy displayed in another exhibition that I reviewed a few years ago in Portland, Oregon. A multimedia show, created and curated by Studio Abioto, a family of Black women, who affirmed how to reclaim nature, and create safe spaces combining old and new approaches to ecological stewardship and community. safety, though, is a relative concept. Whether exploring parks in L.A. or thinking in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, Black women barely move without glancing over their shoulder or facing questioning looks, if not aggression, from those they encounter.

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“I’m still learning how dogged people can be in denial, even when their freedom or their lives are at stake.”― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

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This was my first visit to CAAM. Founded in 1977, it moved into its current housing in 1984, a gorgeous 44,000-square-foot facility designed by African American architects Jack Haywood and Vince Proby. It is the first African American museum of art, history and culture that was fully supported by a state, with no entrance fees or other costs to visitors. According to its website, “[t]he Museum’s permanent collection houses 5,000 objects that span landscape painting and portraiture, modern and contemporary art, historical objects and print materials, and mixed-media artworks. Though the collection emphasizes objects pertinent to California and the American West, it also houses a growing collection of artworks from the African diaspora as well as important works by African Americans from across the United States.”

I had come to see a particular exhibition, Ode to ‘Dena, up until October 25, 2025. It honors the Black cultural heritage of Altadena, a community razed by the Eaton Fire this January, burning for a full 24 days. Eighteen people lost their lives, more than 9,000 buildings were destroyed – my kids’ home among them – their contents lost forever. (If you are interested in a smart, perceptive and emotionally brutally honest eyewitness report of a survivor, I recommend Mike Rothschild’s essay collection on his website here. Latest essay on top; it helps to scroll back to the beginning.)

The exhibition was put together at a mind-boggling speed – opening in April, only three months down the road from the fire. Beautifully curated, it manages to present a variety of art and creators that reminds us of how much is lost. Irreplaceably so, when you consider that many artworks were stored in the houses that burnt, art and dwellings alike often not covered by insurance (California does not require fire insurance for housing that came down through generations, or the rates were basically unaffordable.) Not that money could restore the lost art. But lack of money forces many an owner to sell the now-empty lots to developers with the full understanding that the original character of this close-knit community is going to be radically changed.

Altadena was an epicenter of Black art activity in the 1950s and ’60s. As an unincorporated area it attracted homeowners who otherwise would not have found the opportunity to buy housing: The location against the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains meant that smog collected at that barrier, and so was of no interest to wealthier folks who sought healthier places. I have written about the history of the place here and here, with the second link also depicting Eaton Canyon, where the fire started. Over the decades, an incredible array of artists, musicians, teachers and activists coalesced around this very special place, leaving a distinct imprint.

Painter Charles White is one of the more renowned among them, but there is interesting work to be found all over the halls, some by members of multigenerational families all involved with different media, from prints to weaving and everything between.

Water colors by Keni (Arts) Davis are particularly moving, the selection spanning the years from 2016 to 2025, depicting presence before and absence after the destruction. Here is a subset:

Famous writer Octavia E. Butler lived in Altadena and is buried there. Butler was both a visionary and an astute chronicler of the political experience in a society governed by personal as well as structural racism, and quite aware of the impending threats of fires and floods. The exhibition presents a video outlining her legacy, with the folks at Octavia’s Bookshelf, a book store that became a center for mutual aide and community support in the aftermath of the fire. I had had a conversation with the owner just a few months earlier, when I tried to trace Butler’s footprints in her neighborhood, not just in her novels.

I have been thinking a lot about the writer’s assessment of our capacity for denial, even in the face of factual existential threat. Politics aside, there are scientific data telling us something about climate change, water availability, heat factors, increasing forces of wind and the like. And yet for many people, thrown by their losses into the impossible situation of having to make decisions about where to move from here, denial is still at work. (That is, if you even have a choice – many people are left so destitute that they are forced to rely on those whom they know and who are willing to help.)

The bond to home, to a place you know and grew up in, where your friends or family live in the vicinity, all weigh in in favor of underestimating or unconsciously ignoring the dangers the future holds here for you. I get it. I would be paralyzed myself, if attachment is strong, and the options for change so diffuse and yet manifold, that it is hard even to begin to sort it out. Where will you find work? Where housing? Where are communities that fit your needs? How do you protect your kids from too many changes, recurrent displacements? What if you are old and cannot adapt to new environs?

Which leaves the largest looming question untouched: Is there any place that is safe? From the fires of California to the fires of the Pacific Northwest, from the hurricanes in the usual Atlantic vicinity to the disasters brought to states previously thought somewhat safe, such as North Carolina (think Hurricane Helene), the increasingly frequent and stronger storms in the Midwest, to the earthquake danger along the Pacific Coast – where should one go? Where will there be enough water, food, and still survivable heat for our grandchildren? How many will compete for those resources when climate migration begins in earnest and nation-states become fortresses?

Some of the strongest work in the exhibition is a multimedia installation from 2002 by Dominique Moody. Her sculptures and work on paper point to our possibility to be grounded by memory as much as experience itself: Her poignant characterization of her nine siblings, strewn all over the world, seem to provide a sense of belonging, regardless of geographic closeness or relational community. The artist is probably most renowned for her project NOMAD, the enmeshment of living life and making art in her nomadic existence in a trailer that is simultaneously an exhibit. It was last shown at FRIEZE, LA, this spring. The term stands for Narratives, Odyssey, Manifesting, Artistic, Dreams – and Moody lives the nomadic life, trained early within a military family that saw constant displacement and change. She has placed herself all over the U.S., including the Zorthian Ranch in Altadena, a while back, with fruitful artistic exchange with the artists there. (I stayed there many years later, with my montage work being influenced as well. It, too, burnt to the ground during the Eaton fire.)

Rootlessness can imply that you will never lose your roots, sparing you from emotional disruption – but it can also deprive you of the kind of mutual aid that comes from communities that are experiencing harsh conditions together and stand for each other. Communities such as Altadena, determined to rise from the ashes, quite literally, and yet irrevocably changed, having to weigh all options for a sustainable future.

What all the art I encountered had in common was the invaluable reminder that you can choose perspectives. You can look at damage, or at opportunity. You can look at the power of individual choice or the strength provided by communal support. You can allow emotions to rule, or you can favor rational decision-making. You can doggedly cling to the familiar or acknowledge that we will all have to embrace change at some point. None of the exhibits did this with a wagging finger, or impervious righteousness. It was work full of integrity, equally acknowledging hope and pain.

A privilege to see it all. And brought to the point by the modern quilting work below:

What do I need most right now? Indeed, a shared question for all who experience change and disruption. Safety is high on the list.

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This essay was originally published on YDP – Your Daily Picture on Friday, June 13, 2025. See Friderike Heuer’s previous ArtsWatch stories here.