Kenturah Davis’s “Altadena” (2025) features stars on a 1930s map of the area, indicating important parts of her orbit there. 
Davis as an infant with her older sister and parents on the lawn of her paternal grandmother’s house. 
A young Davis in the backyard of her family’s home.
Kenturah Davis is an artist based in Los Angeles.
“I think about home and where I grew up often, especially now. They were located in a place where many of my heroes—such as Octavia Butler, Charles White, Betye Saar, and John Outterbridge—called home at some point. The place is called Altadena.
I made this print edition of a vintage 1930s map of Altadena, on handmade paper. Since then, some of the street names have changed. New pockets of property have been carved out, but most recently, it was largely leveled by the firestorms of [2025]. The paper is dusted with raw pigment in a way that evokes the heat path from the hill and the canyon into the urban interface.
Part of the map is superimposed with stars indicating the various points of my Altadena orbit. One star marks my grandmother’s house that she moved into in the seventies. Another is the first house mom and dad rented as young parents. Another is the first house they bought. Another is the studio that pulled me back into Altadena after shuffling back and forth between L.A., New Haven, and Accra, Ghana. And finally, one marks the house I bought at seven months pregnant with my first and only child.
The house where I grew up is not really defined by a single piece of architecture, but rather by the space in between a cluster of houses across time.
My mom and dad, who is also an artist, rented a house when they first moved to Altadena, just blocks from my grandmother’s house. A few years later, my parents were able to buy a home nearby, from my mom’s cousin. It was a testament to the peak of opportunity that made home ownership a reality for so many Black Americans trying to navigate around housing discrimination.
This is a home where I blossomed in my own ambitions to become an artist. It’s where my dad taught me how to draw, how to work with wood and quilt-making. Mom taught me how to sew, and it’s also where I evaded learning how to cook.
But back to that first house we moved into in Altadena: The paint color changed since I was little, but along with other tasteful updates, it still holds the magnetic pool of love and nostalgia decades later. I say this [definitively] because when I bought my first home, my new backyard bumped up against my old backyard, though I didn’t realize it when I purchased it. While I took Altadena for granted growing up, as an adult, on the cusp of becoming a mom, I knew I wanted to give my kid the same gifts Altadena gave me.
The Altadena home Davis purchased in 2022. 
Davis and her father sit on the sofa with a painting he made of Davis’s mother hanging above. 
Davis and her sister posing for her father, who was trying to conceptualize an idea for a painting. 
Davis’s childhood home, lost in the fires on January 8, 2025.
We made art in the home I bought, enjoyed our plants. We made watercolors, looked out of windows, probably at birds or butterflies, in a house surrounded by nature, a quality that made Altadena so special.
[The house I grew up in, and the first home I purchased, were lost in the Eaton fire.] And yet, Altadena remains my anchor.
My studio building missed the fire by a block. It is now my headquarters for creativity, problem solving, planning, crying, growing, playing, and designing as we try to piece our lives together and reinvent the places we call home. We do this in the manner of the quilts made by my mother. The house I grew up in is a patchwork of places stitched together by a lineage of joy, sacrifice, and resilience. It is with deep gratitude for my life and survival that I muster all of my energy to help shape this recovery process in Altadena.”
This presentation was part of the inaugural Making Space symposium, which took place in Los Angeles on November 12, 2025 before a live audience. It has been edited and condensed. (Photos courtesy Kenturah Davis)