To Lose Everything

Thinking of the Altadena Bunny Museum

I started crying when I heard the Altadena Bunny Museum burned down in the Eaton Fire. Major museums in Los Angeles like the Getty Villa, which was scorched, and other large museums far from the fires’ paths, are thus far okay.

Steve Lubanski and Candace Frazee, co-founders of the Bunny Museum

The destruction of the Getty’s collection, or any other museums’, would be a catastrophic loss for art history, for culture, for humanity. Those collections contain vital, irreplaceable information about our collective story.

The loss of the Bunny Museum doesn’t hold those implications, but watching the museum’s co-founder hold back tears when describing the 40 years he and his wife spent collecting rabbit figurines, toys, and decorations was devastating.

Humans are collectors of things. No longer a nomadic species, instead we gather the world around us, like a blanket.

We give concrete form to joy, love, fear, big ideas and aspirations in our collections. I collect the works by women artists (and books on women artists) because they are evidence of the vitality of the female spirit, of my female spirit. I collect textiles because I can get lost in the intricacies of process and am comforted by their finitude and by their tactility. They ground me.

A personal collection, unlike a museum collection, is time, experience, and, as a whole, a work of art in itself. It is so much greater than the sum of its parts because it is a reflection of the ineffable character, life, and story of whoever built it.

So who are you, then, when it’s all gone?

The only way that I can begin to make sense of it is to think that the spirit of a collector, the impulse that has us tug the world a little closer through things, cannot be destroyed. If the objects are lost, they release that energy to inhabit something else. But some of it has to die with those lost things, and the energy that exists within the bonds between objects evaporates.

It’s not something I can wrap my head around, and I don’t wish that anyone would ever have to. I’m so sorry if you have.