Silverlinings (westside) with Cara Levine

Silverlinings (westside) with Cara Levine Tuesday, August 27th | 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM 18th Street Arts Center 1639 18th Street, Santa Monica, CA 90404 Free + Open to Survivors of the Eaton and Palisades Fires Join artist Cara Levine, a Palisades fire survivor, for Silverlinings, a collaborative project that explores repair, resilience, and transformation through creative making. Developed in response to the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, Silverlinings creates space for survivors to reflect on experiences of loss, recovery, and care while contributing to a collective process of healing and renewal. Participants are invited to draw an object lost in the fires, or one that evokes a memory of home, in sand. Levine then casts each drawing twice in pewter. Participants receive one casting to keep, while the second becomes part of a growing archive that commemorates the thousands of personal stories connected to the fires. This archive will be exhibited at the conclusion of Levine’s residency at 18th Street Arts Center. Participants may also contribute ceramic shards recovered from their homes as part of Ash Print, an evolving memorial artwork built from materials donated by survivors of the Eaton and Palisades Fires. Together, these works honor what was lost while creating opportunities for remembrance, connection, and collective care. Silverlinings is presented as part of In the After, a series of artist-led projects centered on post-wildfire recovery, storytelling, and community resilience. Please email [email protected] with any questions. RSVP Here This project is presented by 18th Street Arts Center and supported by the California Community Foundation’s Wildfire Recovery Fund. About the Artist Cara Levine is an artist based in Los Angeles, CA, holding an MFA from California College of the Arts (2012). Her practice is a methodology for working with and integrating the ubiquity of loss in our lives and to cultivate grief’s equal and opposite force, love, through the belief that artwork helps us grapple with what are otherwise irreconcilable realities of suffering and injustice. Her work facilitates individuals and groups to bypass their intellect and tap into an embodied experience of living through a multilayered practice encompassing studio, collaborative, and within broader community engagement. Her work has been exhibited globally in one-person, group exhibitions, and participatory events in venues such as the The Oregon Jewish Museum, Portland, OR, (2025-2026), The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco (2023), MOCA Geffen Warehouse, Los Angeles, CA (2020); Creative Time, New York, NY (2019); The Anchorage Museum, Anchorage, AK, (2019), Tenderloin Museum, San Francisco, CA (2017); Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel; Wattis Institute For Contemporary Art, San Francisco, CA (2012); and Kyoto Seika University, Kyoto, Japan (2006). Levine has participated in numerous residencies including, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Los Angeles, CA (2020), Santa Fe Art Institute (2017); The Arctic Circle, International Territory of Svalbard (2017); Sedona Arts Colony, Sedona, AZ (2016); SIM Residency, Reykjavík, Iceland (2015); Anderson Ranch, Aspen, CO (2014); and others. She was an inaugural recipient of the Cultural Leadership Fellowship at the Mandel Institute (2023-2025). Levine has also worked with the disability arts community since 2011 in roles at various progressive art studios including the ECF, Inglewood, CA and Creative Growth, Oakland, CA. She organized the first annual Self-Taught Artists Fair with Public Annex in Portland, OR in 2017. She is currently an Associate Adjunct Professor at Otis College of Art and Design and a Lucas Arts Fellow at Montalvo Arts Center (2024-2027).