Kelly Akashi: A Chimney in Search of a Home Lands 3,000 Miles Away – The New York Times

24 February 2026

On Jan. 7, 2025, high Santa Ana winds lashed Los Angeles. The wildfire danger was extreme. By evening, as the Pacific Palisades burned across town, Kelly Akashi took her cat, Turnip, and a few keepsakes and left her house in Altadena, in the San Gabriel Valley. Between 4 and 5 a.m. the next morning, a wall of flame consumed her whole block.

Akashi, 42, grew up ineast Los Angeles. She studied at Otis College of Art and Design, teaches at ArtCenter in Pasadena and is prominent in the craft and contemporary art scenes. Like thousands of others, she sustained devastating losses in the Eaton Fire: a Spanish Colonial bungalow she bought in 2021, with a studio full of artwork and materials. Now, the only structure standing on her lot is a brick chimney.

She has channelled that loss into her art. For the 2026 Whitney Biennial in New York, which opens March 8, Akashi will debut a major new sculpture, “Monument (Altadena),” a 13-foot chimney and a walkway, both made of clear glass bricks.

This January, as the work was being installed on a fifth-floor terrace of the Whitney, we met for an interview. We had been speaking regularly about her recovery process for a year.

Akashi was pensive and candid, as usual. Focused. And tired. Having a big project had helped her keep going. “I’m obviously not as destabilized as exactly a year ago,” she said, but “it’s all hitting me now.”

The glass chimney is a close replica of the one in Altadena, built in 1926. But it’s another order of experience. Akashi would never simply move her chimney from Altadena to New York, she said. She is wary of framing the work too starkly in terms of the fire. It’s not disaster porn. The work is personal, of course, but it speaks to broader questions of home, belonging and rest. She thinks of the sculpture as “giving a kind of materiality to restlessness.” It’s not a tombstone, it’s a vitrified ghost.

Outside, tessellated sheets of ice flowed down the Hudson. As a precaution, the Whitney’s installation crew wrapped the sections of the chimney in moving blankets and hoisted them onto the terrace with a gantry to acclimate to the cold. The chimney’s 821 glass bricks and metal armature weigh about 6,550 pounds. Another 538 bricks comprise the pathway sunk flush with the terrace’s pavement. The sculpture was built in segments in fabrication studio in the Hudson Valley, then stabilized with steel plates and rods for shipping to Manhattan. With brickwork, this is simply not done. The head mason, Christian Inga, who started learning his trade at age 7, said he’d never moved anything he’d built.

Read the full interview by Travis Diehl for The New York Times here.

Image: Portrait of Kelly Akashi © Kelly Akashi, Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery. Photo by Brad Torchia.