Artist Diana Thater and CMACC’s Cass Fino-Radin On Redbuilding an Archive After Disaster

Last month marked the first anniversary of the fires in Los Angeles that burned over 37 square miles and destroyed 6,837 structures. Many were artist studios, and among them was the studio of Diana Thater, the brilliant video artist who lost her entire archive in the fire. Luckily, this story has a semi-happy ending, as she has begun working with New York’s newest cultural institution, CANYON, which is dedicated to time-based art. We caught up with Thater and Cass Fino-Radin, head of the Canyon Media Art Conservation Center, to learn more about her loss and what she is doing to recover her archive.

Diana, I want to begin by talking about your losses in last year’s fires in Los Angeles. What was your experience in that tragedy?

DT: It all burned down. We lost everything, millions and millions of dollars’ worth of art. My entire archive was lost, except for what my husband grabbed on his way out of the house. Luckily, I have a very good database, so I was able to determine which works are gone forever and which ones I might be able to locate by borrowing from collectors or institutions.

I’m not a person who casually uses the word trauma. I actually object to how it’s used in culture right now; everything is labeled a trauma. But this truly qualified as a severely traumatic event in my life. In one night, I lost everything I’ve ever had. The next day, all we owned were toothbrushes in a plastic bag. That was it. We kept our three cats—I rescued the cats, and my husband rescued the server. It was horrific. It was terrifying. We fled the fire, and a month later, we found an apartment and settled in for a year, but now we’re moving again. It’s been a real struggle, not just with my work but with my life and my life as an artist.

How did the relationship between you and CANYON begin? How did you begin work to try to recover from these losses with the institution?

DT: In 2025, I received the Trellis Foundation Milestone Award—one of ten unrestricted $100,000 grants given to artists. In addition to the funding, they also provide resources and support. They offered me an advisor, Heather Bhandari. She was younger than me and very funny—she said, “I don’t know what I can tell you, you’ve been in the art world for 35 years.” But she did help me.

She asked me what the worst loss was, and I said my archive. She immediately said she had an idea and connected me with Cass at CANYON. Cass thought it was an incredibly interesting project, and we’ve been working together ever since. Out of over 200 artworks, I’ve identified 55 that need to be located. We’re now working to find those pieces in institutions and private collections and digitize them so that I at least have a digital copy of the work.

How has the experience of working together been? How has CANYON approached this differently from other institutions?

DT: Right now, we’re raising funds to support the work ahead. But what makes CANYON different is that this is exactly what they are built to do. I’ve participated in many conferences and symposia about archiving video, and it’s a huge problem. If museums don’t have teams that truly understand how to care for video works, those works will disappear.

When I spoke with Cass, the central question was whether those 55 missing works even exist in viable form. Did the museums care for them properly? CANYON understands this completely. They knew exactly what I had lost and exactly what needed to be done to recover it.

It’s like working with someone who understands what I understand. By contrast, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art was gifted several of my works, I tried to provide installation manuals and certificates, and I was met with an enormous questionnaire written by someone who didn’t understand video at all. CANYON knows what they’re dealing with. They are experts in their field, and I feel incredibly lucky to be working with them.

What advice would you offer to artists about protecting their work from the “acts of God” that seem to be occurring with greater regularity?

DT: First of all, I object to that framing. This was not an act of God. This was an act of man. That fire was caused by Southern California Edison. It wasn’t a forest fire—it was an urban fire that destroyed 9,500 homes. We had 100-mile-per-hour Santa Ana winds, which we’ve never had before. The fire spread so fast that we literally had to run out of the house. It was terrifying and completely out of control. And it makes me angry, because there is someone responsible for this.

As for advice to artists: vault your work. That’s what I’m doing now. I used to believe my work was safest with me, my garage functioned as a film vault, and I could access my archive easily. But that’s no longer true. Now I will vault my work away from my home, in a professional film vault. It will cost a fair amount of money, but that’s my advice. If you make film or video, store it with a professional house. It’s painful because I loved being able to pull past works whenever I wanted. But my past work no longer exists, so that point is moot. Still, it’s practical advice and good advice.

How do you see this recovery effort fitting into CANYON’s broader institutional mission?

CFR: The work with Diana to reconstitute her archives doesn’t just fit into CANYON’s mission. In some ways, it’s a pure expression of it. CANYON was established to fill a much-needed gap: a contemporary art space in NYC specifically dedicated to media art, considering every aspect of the viewer’s experience. The architecture, the technical infrastructure, the hospitality, how we work with artists from the ground up: all optimized to provide artists with the best environment they’ve ever had to show their work and the public the most welcoming experience they’ve ever had. So that it feels natural to spend a considerable amount of time with an artwork that asks you to spend time with it.

Conservation is inseparable from that mission, because one of the unique things about media art is that stewardship and display are completely intertwined. Contrary to the often competing interests of preservation and access, with these kinds of artworks, they must be shown in order to exercise the knowledge and technical systems required to bring them to life. Much of the work involved in media art conservation is explicitly in exhibition. Works of media art don’t just sit around patiently; equipment fails, software silently becomes obsolete, and the whole technical ecosystem a work depends on keeps shifting. The work of stewarding these kinds of artworks is relational: with the artist, tools and systems that make a work run.

Unfortunately, access to that kind of expertise is unevenly distributed. So, in thinking about what the field needed, it was clear that establishing a conservation center at CANYON needed to be a core pillar of our work. Thus, the Canyon Media Art Conservation Center was born, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to be working with Diana as one of our first projects with an artist.

There has been significant excitement around the arrival of CANYON. Does time-based media feel particularly suited to our increasingly overstimulated world?

CFR: Absolutely, but perhaps not for the reasons you might think. You could argue that media art is simply a natural extension of our screen-saturated lives, that artists working with digital tools are doing what artists have always done, reaching for the materials closest at hand. But I don’t think that’s what makes time-based work feel urgently relevant right now.

My personal measure of a work of art’s impact has always been the degree to which I walk away seeing and experiencing the world a bit differently. In a time when society is so immersed in algorithmic mediation, it has never been easier to fabricate false narratives, and platforms hone in on outrage for more engagement. What artists can do, and what I think the best media artists are doing, is draw a circle around that experience. They slow us down, reframe our perspective and create conditions for us to look at all of it with fresh eyes, even if indirectly.

I think that’s the kind of depth and meaning of experience that people crave as an antidote to the vapidity of so much of the media that surrounds us. At CANYON, we’re building a place where people can slow down, stay a while and have that kind of perspective-shifting depth of experience in a space that feels inviting and social.

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