PASADENA — When Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio lost his Altadena home in the recent Eaton Fire, the only thing left standing was the brick fireplace and chimney. “I began thinking about the resilience of these chimneys,” Aparicio told Hyperallergic, referring to the totemic structures that now dot the charred landscapes of Altadena and the Pacific Palisades, memorials to the life that existed there before the fires. “I’m always looking at symbols that can hold both sides of an emotion: resilience and trauma,” he said.
A depiction of Aparicio’s chimney belching thick, black smoke is the focal point of a new painting unveiled Tuesday, March 11, at a Pasadena rally targeting the fossil fuel industry for its role in the recent Los Angeles wildfires. The artist’s first work since the fires, it features a central image surrounded by the text “Invest in Communities, Not Fossil Fuels” in English and Spanish, a message echoed by the coalition of labor, community, and environmental activists who gathered at the Pasadena Community Job Center.
Organized by California Common Good, the event featured rousing speeches from organizers, union members, religious leaders, and local residents affected by the fires, who called on CalPERS, the nation’s largest public pension fund, to fully divest from fossil fuels.
“Our work is focused extensively on getting the pension funds to use their immense wealth to fight against climate change,” Jono Shaffer, a coordinator with California Common Good and a longtime labor organizer, told Hyperallergic.
A group of about two dozen volunteers collaborated on the black-and-white painting, using pigments made from ash and charcoal collected at Altadena burn sites. The paint was mixed by Bay Area artist and activist David Solnit, who has used this method to create similar artworks using ash from the 2017 Tubbs Fire and the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise — the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history. He told Hyperallergic that most of the burned material is collected from rural areas to avoid toxic chemicals, but he symbolically incorporates smaller amounts of ash donated from people’s homes before mixing it with an acrylic binder.
Later in the day on Tuesday, a similar action took place in Northern California, where an identical painting was unveiled in front of the Chevron oil refinery in Richmond. Oil and gas companies have come under increasing scrutiny from environmental activists who argue that the fossil fuel industry has directly contributed to climate change-fueled disasters such as the Eaton and Palisades Fires. In 2023, the State of California sued several companies, including Exxon Mobil, Shell, and Chevron, accusing them of deceiving the public about the dangers of fossil fuels and demanding they fund environmental disaster recovery efforts.
At the Pasadena rally, several signs, also painted with fire ash pigment, demanded that lawmakers “Pass the Make Polluters Pay Superfund Bill.” The recently proposed legislation “would impose an annual assessment of $50 billion on certain companies in the fossil fuel industry as partial compensation for the multitude of costs” resulting from emissions.
On Monday, March 17, California Common Good will take one of Aparicio’s protest paintings to a rally in Sacramento, where CalPERS will be holding a board meeting. Organizers are hoping to convince the pension fund to divest from fossil fuels, for both environmental and economic reasons. “They estimate a quarter of a trillion dollars in damage from the fires. If you’re a pension fund, that will have a drastically bad effect on your stability and ability to meet your responsibilities,” Shaffer said. “This is workers’ money. How do we get our money to work for us, and not just the billionaires?”
“We had 30 minutes of talking here today,” Shaffer told Hyperallergic at Tuesday’s Pasadena rally, “but in 30 seconds, this painting tells you what you need to know about what’s going on in our communities.”
