“I lost my home and my collection of 30 original Andy Warhol artworks in the LA fires”

Ron Rivlin got his start hosting raves when he was a student at Western University. His passion for events brought him to LA twenty-five years ago and eventually into the art world: he started collecting the works of pop art icons, including his favourite, Andy Warhol. By the time the LA fires hit his Pacific Palisades neighbourhood, Rivlin had close to 400 Warhol pieces. The majority remain safe at his West Hollywood gallery, but about 30 were in his home. “I try not to think about what I wish I had taken with me, because it makes me sick,” says Rivlin, who has been managing the fallout—including over $15 million in lost art—by focusing on the positives. Here, he shares his wildfire story, including the potent message behind the one piece that survived the blaze.

Where we live in the Pacific Palisades, almost everyone has the Citizen app—an emergency alert system that tells you what’s happening in your neighborhood in real time. You hear about everything: home invasions, police activity and, of course, fires. Brush fires happen all the time in the Santa Monica mountains, which are close to our neighbourhood—we’re nestled on the side of the mountain, less than a kilometre from the foothills. Usually, the fires are put out within a few hours, and we move on. People talk about them like near-misses—“Oh, how close were you?”—but no one really thinks their home will be the one to burn down. On January 7, at 10:40 a.m., I got the alert. I checked the app and saw that the fire was pretty close to my best friend’s place, about two kilometres away from mine, so I called him to check in. He said he couldn’t believe how fast it was moving. The winds were already strong—around 30 kilometres per hour, compared with the usual five to 15 for this time of the year—and this wasn’t a normal fire.

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I stepped out onto my third-storey deck so I could see what was happening. The flames were jumping from one location to another, and then another: in less than ten minutes, it spread from about one acre to twenty. Ten minutes after that, the sky was black, right in the middle of the day. Planes were circling and dumping water, but that didn’t seem to be making any difference.

By this point, my wife was freaking out. She and my daughter packed up and left around noon, heading to a friend’s house. But I wanted to stay. I figured there was no way the flames were going to cross Sunset Boulevard, since it’s four lanes of concrete. My understanding was that, if your home was on this side of Sunset, your fire risk was low. I even invited some friends over whose homes were closer to the immediate danger, thinking we could ride it out together, using my place as a sanctuary.

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Then, around 3 p.m., my wife called—and she wasn’t messing around. She put my daughter on the phone, who was crying, and called back every five minutes to make sure I was on my way. I told my friends I was leaving but that they could stay if they wanted. Deep down, I still thought my wife was overreacting. Before long, I was driving toward Sunset, and it was like a scene from a disaster movie. I saw flames over 50 metres high. I heard a loud crackling sound, like popcorn in a microwave, and realized it was the power lines on fire. It finally hit me just how bad this was. There were flaming embers the size of baseballs flying through the air, setting off fires wherever they landed. Smaller streets in the Palisades were jammed. I called my friends from the road and told them to get out now.

Of course, I was worried about my home and especially about my art collection. I had over 340 pieces there: 30 Warhols, plus works by Keith Haring, John Baldessari, Damien Hirst, Alex Katz, Kenny Scharf, and more. As I left, I remember thinking, It’s okay—the home is fire resistant, I have over 100 sprinklers installed and most of the art is covered in Plexiglas. My car is a Porsche 911, so there wasn’t a lot of room. I had grabbed three smaller Warhol pieces, which had both sentimental and financial value: they’re worth about $3 million. The first was a 1977 Warhol self-portrait that hung above my desk and always felt like a reminder of what I was doing and why I loved it. The second was Four Hearts, a painting of four pink hearts on a black background—I always saw my family in it: me, my wife and our two kids. And the last was a black-and-white tomato-soup artwork. Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans are iconic, and the screenprints are quite valuable, but this was a one-of-a-kind painting. When I first started collecting Warhol in 2011, this piece was on my bucket list. Finally getting it four years ago was a big deal.

For me, the soup cans sum up everything I love about Warhol’s work. The way they shook up the art world, the debate they sparked—What is art? And who gets to decide?—these are still the questions that drive me. I have always loved counterculture. I grew up in Thornhill with former hippie parents, listening to Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead throughout high school. Later, I got into the rave scene and started promoting underground shows at Western University and in Toronto, Montreal and Seattle. I’ve always gravitated toward the forward-thinking artists who challenge the status quo. Warhol represents all of that for me.

On the day of the fire, I met up with my wife and my kids at a friend’s house. We sat glued to the TV, watching Fox News, and I couldn’t believe it when my home appeared on the screen. They were focusing on my neighbour’s home, which was engulfed in flames. Mine was right next to it. From that angle, it looked like it was still standing, and I thought, Maybe it’s going to be okay. Our house was built five years ago, and the threat of a fire had been front of mind, both because of my art collection and in keeping with LA’s strict fire codes. I just never imagined that the house would burn from the inside out—which is what happened after a large window shattered and embers flew inside. The exterior was the last part to collapse.

I didn’t know any of this until the next day. The entire area was restricted by the police, but I managed to sneak in, still holding on to this tiny sliver of hope. The first thing I saw was a CNN van parked in front of my house. And then I saw the “house” itself—or what was left of it. Moments later, I was standing in front of a camera doing an interview for Wolf Blitzer. I was just completely raw and vulnerable, 100 per cent running on adrenalin. I remember hesitating, saying that I didn’t want to cry on TV, but they said that people needed to see this authentic emotion, so I agreed to share what I was going through.

Afterward, I walked around the rubble for hours, looking for anything that might be salvageable. It was all just ashes and unrecognizable chunks, with the exception of one 15-foot statue called Broken But Together by Michael Benisty. It’s an iconic piece from the Burning Man community, and because it’s made of steel, it survived. The symbolism felt so powerful: we’re all a little broken, but together we persevere.

I try not to think of what else I wish I’d taken. It makes me feel sick. It wasn’t just my art collection. It was our family photo albums of three generations, which I wanted to take but didn’t have time to get from the garage. It was my collection of Grateful Dead memorabilia, like my Stanley Mouse paintings and a piece by Jerry Garcia. It was my father’s coin collection, including coins from the Greek and Roman eras, which he gave me a few years ago. I had planned to hand these down to my children one day.

And then, of course, there was the house itself—our dream home: a custom build complete with a proper movie theatre, a gym, an arcade and a studio where I made my art, plus a 2,000-square-foot nightclub in the basement. Ours was the house that everyone came to. The area is a bit sleepy, but we created a great community over the years. I started a regular party night called “Fuck You If You’re Not 40,” where bouncers would check IDs at the door and, if you were under 40, they’d throw your ID into the street. It was a place for older people who still like to party without feeling old. We had a massive Halloween party a few months back with over 200 people, mainly neighbours. It’s hard to look at those photos and think, Wow, we had no idea it was about to be over.

Of course, I know there are people who have lost more. This was an affluent neighborhood full of multimillion-dollar homes—but there were also many renters and generational homeowners who are now faced with major financial struggles. Besides, money doesn’t stop a fire, and it doesn’t bring back a community. Schools are gone. Families are scattered across the city and even across the country. Some neighbours have already left the state. Others are thinking about it. These things don’t just rebuild overnight. A house can be reconstructed, but a community? That takes years—if it ever really comes back.

I was talking the other day about three types of hurt. First, the gut punch: that initial unbelievable shock that winds you when you realize everything is gone. Then, the heartache: losing things that can’t be replaced. Then, the disorientation: trying to figure out what happens next. And you don’t experience them one at a time or one after the other. It’s all of them, over and over. But I try to focus on the positive. I’m fortunate to have gotten to enjoy these things for a while.

And I was lucky to save a few pieces, including a pocket watch from Warhol’s personal collection. I don’t even remember where I got it—after purchasing more than 1,500 Warhol works and artifacts over the years, not every detail sticks. I think about how much worse things could have been if the fire had started at 10:30 p.m. instead of in the morning. Would people have slept through it, only to wake up when it was too late to get away? I’ve seen videos of people abandoning their cars on Sunset Boulevard, running for their lives. It’s terrifying to consider.

I still have my gallery in West Hollywood, where most of my collection is. I lost a cherished Warhol print of Queen Elizabeth II in the fire, but I have a similar one at the gallery. Not everything is replaceable, but the thing about Warhol—and other artists like Haring and Hirst—is that they were prolific. My plan is to take some time to process everything and then start to rebuild—both my art collection and our home.

In the meantime, we’ve been talking about moving back to Toronto for a few years. It would be an opportunity to reconnect with old friends, which is the kind of thing you think about when you go through something like this. What really matters? Family. Health. The people in your life. The past is just memories, regardless of whether your house burned down. What matters are the present and the future. I’m lucky to have both, and that’s not something I’ll take for granted. My life has been full of adventures. I have a few more stories about narrowly escaping disaster, but those are for another day. For now, we move forward.