Diana Thater | The Observer
Installation View: Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination, LACMA, Los Angeles, 2016
by Dan Duray
A year after the Los Angeles wildfires destroyed her studio, Diana Thater is working with CANYON to trace the scattered remnants of her work across institutions and private collections.
DD: Diana, I want to begin by talking about your losses in last year’s fires in Los Angeles. What was your experience in that tragedy?
DT: It all burned down. We lost everything […]. My entire archive was lost, except for what my husband grabbed on his way out of the house. Luckily, I have a very good database, so I was able to determine which works are gone forever and which ones I might be able to locate by borrowing from collectors or institutions.
I’m not a person who casually uses the word trauma. I actually object to how it’s used in culture right now; everything is labeled a trauma. But this truly qualified as a severely traumatic event in my life. In one night, I lost everything I’ve ever had. The next day, all we owned were toothbrushes in a plastic bag. That was it. We kept our three cats—I rescued the cats, and my husband rescued the server. It was horrific. It was terrifying. We fled the fire, and a month later, we found an apartment and settled in for a year, but now we’re moving again. It’s been a real struggle, not just with my work but with my life and my life as an artist.
In 2025, I received the Trellis Foundation Milestone Award—one of ten unrestricted $100,000 grants given to artists. In addition to the funding, they also provide resources and support. They offered me an advisor, Heather Bhandari. She was younger than me and very funny—she said, “I don’t know what I can tell you, you’ve been in the art world for 35 years.” But she did help me.
She asked me what the worst loss was, and I said my archive. She immediately said she had an idea and connected me with Cass at CANYON. Cass thought it was an incredibly interesting project, and we’ve been working together ever since. Out of over 200 artworks, I’ve identified 5 that need to be located. We’re now working to find those pieces in institutions and private collections and digitize them so that I at least have a digital copy of the work.