At Felix Art Fair 2025, the Los Angeles Art Community Unites After the Fires
By Maxwell Rabb
It’s hard to think of a more crucial moment for Felix Art Fair than right now. Since its debut in 2018, the fair has championed the Los Angeles community with a culture-specific, approachable ethos that feels distinctly of its home city: laid-back, yet fervently engaged. It’s this communal aspect of the fair that is more important than ever just weeks after the devastating Eaton and Palisade fires struck through the nearby Southern California neighborhoods.
As the cost of the fires—which have claimed more than 40,000 acres of land and more than 10,000 homes across Los Angeles County—continues to be counted, the L.A. art scene has shown its resilience and perseverance, as artists, galleries, and institutions united in a series of fundraising and relief efforts. Felix, which sits in the middle of a week of art events in Los Angeles, decided, along with Frieze and the new art fair Post-Fair, that it would carry on with its initial plans. This decision, borne from consultations with local arts stakeholders, underscored its foundational principle: to be a fair for and by the L.A. community.
“The whole idea of the fair is to be welcoming,” Mills Morán, co-founder of Felix and Los Angeles gallery Morán Morán, told Artsy. “This wasn’t a decision we made unilaterally. This was feedback from everyone in the arts community—from art workers to artists, gallerists, and fabricators. Everybody was overwhelmingly in favor of pushing forward with a week like this. This is the first moment where people are going to be together.”
As a visitor, Miami-based Nina Johnson made an effort to understand what the local community needed. “It’s always hard as an outsider, coming into a city, but we spoke with a lot of our colleagues that have galleries here and other artists that are in L.A., and the feeling was ‘We want people here. This is the moment to come and rally,’” said founder Nina Johnson.
The gallery staged a group presentation in a poolside cabana featuring the works of L.A.-based artist Tara Walters, who lost her home in the fires. A standout is Blue (For Jack Bendes) (2025), which depicts a giant blue dolphin jumping above the ocean. Walters is known for her process-driven approach: She often pours ocean water over acrylic-painted canvases, allowing the drying patterns to shape her imagery.
The gallery is also showing several sculptural works made with denim jeans by Christy Gast and giant stoneware vessels by L.A.-based artist Jasmine Little. New York–based artist Madeline Donahue also provided ceramic vases, actively decorating the cabana. Each vase is priced at $1,000, and prices for works in the gallery’s booth stretch to $30,000.
