The Tamesis
When fire spread to Diana Thater’s home in Altadena last January, there was no time to triage. When she and her husband, artist T. Kelly Mason, evacuated before the fire, Mason grabbed what he could carry: a server and a few hard drives. The man took the cat away. Everything else—decades of original footage, master tapes, installation manuals, ephemera, paintings—was left in a climate-controlled garage and eventually burned.
“It’s difficult to live to be 62 and lose your entire life overnight,” Thater told reporters new york times then. The loss was not only personal, but also professional. Much of her work, created since the early 1990s, exists at the intersection of video, sound and installation, a medium whose survival depends on constant technical maintenance. While some of her post-2005 work has been digitized and preserved on a hard drive carried out by her husband, the bulk of her earlier archive has never been transferred. Those materials are gone.
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A year later, as Los Angeles marks the anniversaries of the Altadena and Pacific Palisades fires, Tate’s experience is representative of a broader, unresolved question in contemporary art: how fragile media-based practices remain after leaving the studio, and how little infrastructure exists to support artists when disaster strikes.
In the months after the fire, Thater began working with the Center for Media Arts Conservation in the Canyon (CMACC), a new nonprofit conservation lab set to open in 2026 dedicated to time-based media art. Led by Cass Fino-Radin, a longtime media arts conservator and former staff member at the Museum of Modern Art and the digital arts nonprofit Rhizome, CMACC aims to address a conservation crisis caused by outdated technology, limited institutional capacity, and the sheer volume of digital material produced by contemporary artists.
For Thater, the collaboration is both pragmatic and urgent. While dozens of her works were destroyed in the fire, many others remain in museums and private collections around the world. CMACC is currently working with her to find the best surviving versions of these works—master tapes, artist proofs, or institutionally preserved copies—so that they can be evaluated, digitized, and returned, thereby restoring as much of her archive as possible.
“This is detective work,” Thiel told art news in a recent interview. “Who has which edition? In what condition? Is it the edition that should be preserved?” The process includes contacting collectors and institutions, assessing aging tape formats, and in some cases attempting final restoration from fragile analog media. The goal is not to recreate what was lost but to reconstruct her archive in a form that will last.
But Tarr’s example is not an exception, but a common experience faced by film and video artists. For decades, these artists have often been responsible for managing the preservation of their own works, especially since collectors or institutions often lacked personnel dedicated to such conservation. Even when contracts require work to be moved every few years, these updates are often withdrawn. At the same time, digital storage comes with its own risks, according to Fino-Radin: hard drives fail, formats become unreadable, and the “cloud” is no substitute for active management.
CMACC was born in response to this reality. Although located within the Canyon, the upcoming Time Art Museum and exhibition space on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, CMACC serves as a conservation laboratory focused on serving the entire field—artists, collectors, and institutions—regardless of their relationship to the Canyon’s collections and programs. The goal is to create a long-term cooperative model for regional conservation centers for painting and sculpture for media arts.
Fino-Latin describes this moment as similar to the early 20th century, when American museums first recognized that traditional conservation models were unsuitable for modern art. “We are at a similar inflection point now,” they said. “Media arts has become central to contemporary practice, but the systems designed to look after it have not caught up.”
Unlike private conservation studios, which are often inaccessible to artists, CMACC operates as a non-profit organization, raising funds to support projects that would otherwise not be possible. Tarr’s archive is one of its first high-profile examples, but the center’s mission is broader: to stabilize work, set standards and build long-term capacity for a medium that resists permanence through design.
The fires that devastated Los Angeles last year laid bare the risks of the job. Thousands of homes were destroyed, including artists’ studios that doubled as archives, storage facilities and production sites. For many, the loss is complete. Insurance can replace equipment, but not the cumulative record of time, authorship, or career.
Tarr knows exactly what can and cannot be restored. Some works just disappear. Others may still be saved. What matters now, she says, is whether the process exists. “It’s not academic,” she said. “It’s about whether the work survives.”
