Salomón Huerta on Art and Altadena

Salomón Huerta has been a fixture in the Los Angeles art community for decades. A native of the infamous Ramona Gardens housing projects in Boyle Heights, he took art classes at Pasadena City College and earned a bachelor’s in fine arts from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena and a master’s at UCLA. He’s had solo shows in New York, Italy, Shanghai, Mexico City, and galleries across Southern California. Recently, he’s become renowned for his ethereal paintings of pools. Snapshot memories from when he was a teenager and would tag along to Malibu with his father, hoping to find work as a day laborer. He was often hired to clean backyard pools. Huerta is the anti-Hockney. Instead of the bleary-eyed ecstatic, what you see is sterility and stillness, but the colors pop, and the overall effect is penetrating.

In the early morning hours of Jan. 8, the Eaton Fire destroyed the Altadena home where Huerta and his wife, the artist Ana Morales-Huerta, had been living for three years. They lost nearly all their belongings and were left with minimal savings to restart their lives.

We were eight houses surrounded by trees in a little cul-de-sac in Altadena, and the night before the fire started, the winds were really bad. Trees were already falling in the park and in the street, and we had a warning that on Tuesday, it was gonna be worse.

I went to my studio [in Westwood] that morning. It takes me an hour to get there, and there was no sign of any fires. I was working on a painting, and once I’m in Westwood, the only time to come home is after 8 p.m. when traffic has cooled down. I don’t get any alerts on my phone, so at 8 o’clock, my wife Ana called me, and she goes, “Don’t you know there’s a fire? I can see it from the doorstep. It’s big!”

Everyone who knows me knows that I drive like an old lady because I don’t wanna get a ticket, but I have a fast car, and I floored it on the freeway. When I was driving up to our little house, people were coming down the hill really fast, and I was thinking about the people in the Palisades who had to evacuate their cars. There was some smoke, a lot of debris, and the wind was horrible. My wife was waiting for me. She was really nervous, but once I got home, it took me less than five minutes to grab what I needed. Like a David Bowie Diamond Dogs record one of my collectors gave me. It’s worth $10,000.

I was just grabbing whatever was of value that would be easy to sell, but I wasn’t able to think straight. I left a lot of valuable stuff behind. Stuff that cannot be replaced. I had an art collection, other artists. A bag of childhood photos—really old photos of my parents. In that same bag were my archives. Transparencies, and slides I was gonna digitize.

My neighbor called me the next day. They have a 2-year-old, and he just grabbed the kid and they left. They didn’t take anything. There was a neighbor next to me, Juan. He didn’t leave until 3:30 a.m. when the fire was already at the houses. He told me that when he drove down to the intersection and made a left, there was a wall of fire blocking the whole street, so he made a U-turn and was able to get through the other way.

Salomón Huerta, ‘Untitled (House),’ 2022, Acrylic and oil on canvas, 60 x 48 inches. Courtesy Salomón Huerta and Harper’s, New York.

I was born in Tijuana, but at the age of three, I came over here to L.A. I spent 26 years in the housing projects in Ramona Gardens. From there, I jumped around. I lived with my sister in Van Nuys. Ten years off and on. I’ve only been in Altadena three years. But, you know, it’s the first time I’ve felt a sense of community.

Everyone knew each other. My friend Patricia Valencia is also an artist. I’ll call her at 7:30 and ask, “Girl, you having coffee?” And she’s like, “Yeah, I’m coming over.” If we want some wine and don’t have any in the house, I’ll call her and go pick it up. It was the first time in my life where I’d go for walks. If I walked to the gym, which was a 25-minute walk, I would literally high-five my neighbors all the way down. That doesn’t happen in most places. All the places I lived, I never went for a walk. It would never even cross my mind.

We were happy there. We were only paying $1,900 a month for that little house. In the evening, you could hear coyotes. You could hear the owls. In the morning, you wake up to roosters and different kinds of birds. There’s a block with more than 20 peacocks. It was a hidden gem.

It’s all gone, and I don’t want to go back. If I think about Altadena, I want to think about the good moments that we had and how it felt. I have PTSD from being raised in the projects. Altadena made me feel at peace.

Adam Skolnick spoke to Salomón Huerta by phone on Jan. 22, 2025. He was staying in his sister’s home in Van Nuys, searching for a new place to live. Three days after the fire, he was back in his studio, preparing work for a new show scheduled for May in New York City.