Rebirth for burned sculpture garden
Art haven in Santa Rosa has new life with works of memory, restoration
When the Tubbs Fire came over the hill from Calistoga, it headed straight for the redwood sculptures at Luther Burbank Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa.
The sculpture garden had cost $300,000 to build and opened just three years before, on a strip of land between a hospital and the Luther Burbank performing arts complex just to the east of U.S. 101. Bruce Johnson’s installation of 16 mammoth works carved out of old-growth redwood marked the opening exhibit and had just been extended.
But for two days in October, the flames and embers feasted on Johnson’s art, burning a wooden temple to the ground and slow-roasting other sculptures, while also melting the lights and irrigation system, wrecking a footbridge and charring the landscape into a total loss. It has taken nearly a year to bring it back, and on Fri-
“I’m sure their ideas are influenced by the trauma that we all lived through.” Kate Eilertsen, curator
day, the sculpture garden reopens with “Harmonies,” a two-year exhibit of mostly new work by Jann Nunn, Catherine Daley and Kati Casida.
The three women were commissioned long before the firestorm began on Oct. 8. There were no thematic instructions given then and none after the fire. But working separately, they contributed art that addresses the fire tragedy in both message and materials. The 13 sculptures are mostly built of cement, stainless steel, coated steel and aluminum.
“That’s kind of beautiful,” says Kate Eilertsen, who curated the exhibition. “I’m sure their ideas are influenced by the trauma that we all lived through.”
Even Nunn, who was already at work carving a series of redwood pieces as a response to the ones already there, could not continue with a material prone to kindling.
“I decided to nix the wood,” says Nunn, a retired art professor at Sonoma State University. “I didn’t feel that I could go ahead with that in light of what had happened.”
Bad as it was, it could have been worse at Luther Burbank Center. The fire hadn’t come at a time when the 1,600-seat Ruth Person Finley Theater, largest fixed-seat venue in Sonoma County, or the 400-seat auditorium were filled with people. The main stage escaped the fire when it arrived Oct. 9, but the small stage was destroyed. So were a school building leased to a private school, a maintenance shed and a storage facility holding 600 musical instruments that the nonprofit lends out into the community.
The 1.5-acre sculpture garden is also a community asset. It is lighted at night, always open and free. Patients and their visitors at Sutter Santa Rosa Regional Hospital have come to depend on the therapeutic qualities of the plantings and the sculpture, which are connected by meandering paths and two footbridges.
“We have people who come just to walk the garden,” says Anita Wiglesworth, director of programming at Luther Burbank Center. “It is still a little heartbreaking, because the garden had really matured in three years.”
The garden was still smoldering and smoking when the evacuation was lifted, and sculptor Johnson came to assess the damage. Of 16 pieces, six were burned to the ground, three were burned from within and badly charred, and seven survived. He hauled it all to his studio in Fort Ross, on the Sonoma coast, and started rebuilding. His huge new piece has been installed across the parking lot from the sculpture garden, at the entrance to the concert hall. Titled “Kali,” for the Hindu goddess of destruction and renewal, it is built of cypress logs but sheathed in flame-resistant copper.
“The most important thing for me in the wake of the fire and the emotional trauma was to be able to go to my studio and work rather than mope around,” he says.
While starting over with her own commissions after the fire, Nunn had planned to include one existing work, a towering stainless steel piece called “Commune.” But it had been on loan to Paradise Ridge Winery, which had been destroyed.
“I was loath to contact Paradise Ridge in light of the fact that they had lost their winery,” she says. “It seemed petty.”
Daley had relocated to Windsor, after 20 years in Santa Rosa. During that time she had lived in three places. All three of them burned to the ground.
“I would have lost everything if I hadn’t moved,” she says. “I’ve gone back and looked at the ashes. It was heartbreaking.” In response, she created a 6-foot-tall aluminum latticework meant to evoke “the gaps and voids created by tragedy,” she says.
Called “Lacunae,” it was unwrapped last week at the sculpture garden. It has a black granite base, resembling a grave marker and is located across a dry creek from “Commune,” the piece that Nunn was afraid to call about. It survived the fire that burned Paradise Ridge Winery.
Daley, as it turns out, earned her bachelor of art degree in studio art at Sonoma State, where her faculty adviser was Nunn. They remain close, though they did not discuss their work for this project. So it is coincidental that both have art meant as memorials.
Nunn’s commission is a series of stones cast in white concrete. The markers are shaped like stars, 44 of them, or one for each fatality in the Wine Country fires.
The stars are scattered like tombstones along 80 feet of dry creek bottom, just below the footbridge that burned but did not collapse in the fire.
It is titled “XLIV (44),” and in the winter rains, the stars will disappear into the creek. In the wind, Daley’s sculpture will bend like blades of grass.
“I see the whole show as an opportunity for healing,” says Daley, who is nearly moved to tears just thinking back on it. “My hope is that people can go there and find some solace and comfort, and be inspired to carry on.”