Mills College, founded in 1852, was one of the earliest women’s colleges on the West Coast of the United States. I went there to study Studio Art with a focus on Conceptual Art. It was—and still is—a magical place, with a kind of witchy energy spread across its large and beautiful campus.

It’s one of those places charged with history—still physically here, but on the verge of becoming part of the past. Just a year after I graduated, Mills was absorbed by Northeastern University. Its land and architecture remain, but much of its unique intellectual and cultural spirit was not carried forward. It’s one of many cultural institutions I’ve encountered that seem to exist in a state of disappearance. That’s why I often describe my experience at Mills—and at other such places—as half-historic.

Mills has long been a birthplace of remarkable female artists, a hub for experimental and contemporary music, and—less widely known—a haven for European artists and intellectuals such as Alfred Neumeyer, Lyonel Feininger, and László Moholy-Nagy, who fled Europe to escape the Nazis. It was a surprise that even the renowned Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka considered coming to Mills after receiving an invitation from Neumeyer. It’s a place with many layers of cultural and historical significance, which I hope to explore further in future writings.

For now, it stands as the place where I received an elevating education, generous support, and my Master of Fine Arts. And, of course, it’s also the place where new artworks emerged. One of those works, Wildfire, Oakland, CA, 2019, is shown here on this website.

Kincade Fire

I was a grad student at Mills College in Oakland when a monstrous cloud of smoke was making its way toward campus. The Kincade Fire—at the time the largest of the season—had already burned through 260,000 acres of land, and the smoke from all that scorched flora and fauna was being pushed directly toward us.

I didn’t know what to expect. I felt oddly excited. Maybe because it was the first time I experienced a cloud of smoke in this planetary scale. It reminded me of the earthquakes we’d often feel on campus, since Mills sits right on the Hayward Fault Line. There was something thrilling about it, even though it felt dangerous.

A few hours before the smoke was supposed to arrive, I grabbed a stack of regular copy paper and some inks from my studio. I went behind the dorms, into the woods, and set everything up. I poured the inks on the top sheet, tucked it all away a bit so no one—students or security—would notice, and went back to my tiny room to wait.

Time passed. People came back from class, chatted in the hallway, and eventually went to bed. I sat in my room, unsure if I’d even notice when the cloud arrived. But I did. I remember it so clearly—the moment when smoke suddenly started seeping in. Fast. The air thickened. I ran to the bathroom to wet a towel and stuffed it into the cracks around the old wooden window. It helped, but not much. The panic kicked in. For a moment I really thought it wasn’t just smoke from faraway Napa—I thought the forest behind our dorms was on fire. There were no campus alerts. I had to go outside, in the middle of the night, to see for myself that nothing was actually burning. Just this monstrous cloud, passing by.

The next morning I remembered the paper and inks I’d left out there. I went to pick them up, curious. But nothing looked out of the ordinary. No mark, no sign of what had happened. I didn’t spend much time with it—just put the stack aside and went back to classwork.

I forgot about it, almost completely.

At the end of the semester, during review time, I came across the stack again. I laid out all 45 sheets of paper on the floor. Climbed up on my studio desk. Took a photo from above. And something shifted. This time, it didn’t feel like a static composition—it felt like a sequence. Like frames from a film. I brought the sheets to the media lab, scanned every one of them, and watched the sequence unfold. In motion, I started to see something: Trees engulfed in fire and smoke.