Apocalypse Now
Early January 2025. There is not a single place in Los Angeles that feels safe, according to friends. As a series of destructive wildfires begins tearing through the east in Pasadena and Altadena and to the west in Malibu and the Pacific Palisades, the dry brush and grass surrounding the sprawling county amounts to obliteration. It feels like the end of some Edenic myth. I try not to send too many worried emails and texts to friends as I watch the line of fire approach their homes. Each response I receive says the same: It’s so much worse than ever before.
Across various news outlets, podcasts, and social media, Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006) and her Afrofuturist novel Parable of the Sower (1993) are being held up, once again, as prescient. Everyone is reading the book, or at least saying they are. Many are calling it a signifier for the moment because it unfolds in 2024—in a Southern California scarred by wildfire and climate change—while an authoritarian president rises in power and the novel’s fifteen-year-old protagonist, Lauren Oya Olamina, tries to make a better world. Fire is a central element in the story: it helps drug-addicted pyromaniacs annihilate Lauren’s home in July 2027, and is necessary for rebirth, as a heavily circulated line reminds us: “In order to rise from its own ashes, a phoenix first must burn.”
It’s not long before people start calling the Pasadena-born Butler a “clairvoyant”—a “mystic,” even. Others contend that she wasn’t prophesying; rather, she had been issuing a warning. She described her parables as “cautionary tales.” Because Butler was able to pay such close attention to where she had been living for decades, she was able to glean from the present and picture the future. But isn’t that what artists and writers always do? By focusing their attention so acutely on their surroundings—the good, the bad, everything in between—they are changed by what they see. And they then spread that change around, which (hopefully) prompts others to change. If Butler were alive today, she’d likely be asking us, “If you knew the fires were coming in two years, what would you do? What would you change now?”
All that you touch, you change.
All that you change, changes you.
The only lasting truth is change.
God is change.
– Parable of the Sower, Chapter One.
The national backdrop to all of this is Trump’s looming inauguration and for some of us, a reflection on how different the moment feels from 2016, when collective outrage led to mass protests, but also to other efforts that in retrospect seem like spinning one’s wheels. (Mine involved asking artists to submit “responses” for Artforum’s website.) A great many people are questioning, once again, what can be done. Parable of the Sower provides one answer: non-performative activism. This includes short-term and long-term strategies, coalition building, and direct action.
During these weeks, I return to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s stylish and incisive text “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You” for some grounding. In the essay, Sedgwick explains that the paranoid reader will always see the future as inevitable. However, the reparative reader, as Sedgwick writes, “has room to realize that the future may be different from the present. It is also possible for her to entertain such profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did.” There are no truer words for Butler. Like everyone else, I pick up Parable of the Sower again, and then I return to other, shorter writings of hers. Meanwhile, there’s an image that keeps appearing in my mind: a sculpture by American Artist of a bus stop sign rising out of a steel agave plant.
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Butler never drove. From a young age, buses were her primary way of getting around L.A. Naturally, the people she encountered on board fueled her writing and informed her ear-to-the-ground knowledge of the city. Her 1983 short story, “Speech Sounds,” which won Butler her first Hugo Award in 1984, begins, “There was trouble aboard the Washington Boulevard bus.” She often took the 70 and 71 lines to the public library in Downtown LA and there are multiple schedules for both in her papers, which are held at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in posh San Marino—a town not far from Pasadena, but distant in terms of class. It’s likely that Butler’s single mother traveled often to San Marino, providing essential and underpaid care to the wealthy.
American’s sculpture series “To Acorn,” 2023–, replicates Rapid Transit District vintage bus signs for the 70 and 71 buses. Instead of going to Downtown LA, however, we can imagine passengers heading to Acorn, the community Lauren establishes in Northern California with other members of her religion, Earthseed. There, we would see the large, sharp agaves the collective planted around their compound to shield them from the harsh outside world. The series debuted in American’s solo exhibition at REDCAT in LA in 2022. It was one of two finished pieces on view when I visited during the installation of their solo show at Pioneer Works in January 2025, one week before it was set to open. The first thing we discussed: how many of American’s oldest friends had just lost housing in their hometown, Altadena. As we talk, I can’t help but wonder what Butler would make of the LA County Sheriff’s Department increasing patrols in the area to “combat looting.” And I think about American’s 2020 web project Looted, commissioned by the Whitney Museum—an institution that, like the luxury stores surrounding it during the beginning of Covid, had boarded up its ground-floor windows.
Like Butler, American is a descendant of a Black Southern family that migrated westward to California to escape racial violence. And like Butler, they attended John Muir High School in Pasadena. In 2013, right before graduate school, they legally changed their name to the more anonymous American Artist. They have continued to explore how having a less identified presence—that is, in terms of identity politics—creates both an absence and an integration into the art world. At the same time, their perspicacious work, such as My Blue Window, 2020, confronts anti-Black racism, including police brutality and Blue Lives Matter activism.
After several successful solo shows worldwide and a residency at Pioneer Works, American embarked on a long-term project, Shaper of God—a deep dive into all things Butler. As we spoke about the fruits of their labor, five years after the project was envisioned, it became clear to me that American falls into the camp of people who would not call Butler a “clairvoyant.” Beyond biography, American and Butler share several affinities, including an acute experiential knowledge of their birthplace and an awareness of its possible futures. “The information is there. If you pay attention, you can see what might happen,” they say as we discuss Butler’s granular approach to writing and to examining LA from the bus window.
Shaper of God consists of three chapters, which simultaneously examine the forces that impacted Butler as a youth and that led her to craft, as American says, “a practice built on foundations not urgency.” There’s a section that looks at her maternal lineage, perhaps best signified by the other fully installed work that day, the sculpture Estella Butler’s Apple Valley Autonomy, 2025. The work refers to her grandmother’s chicken coop at the family’s home in Apple Valley, California. Taylor Renee Aldridge points out in the show’s accompanying catalogue that the coop enabled “autonomous income” for Butler’s family, “at a time when autonomous labor opportunities for African American women were incredibly limited.” When Butler was four years old, the home burned to the ground, and she described being carried out in the middle of the night as one of her earliest memories. It also became one of her greatest curiosities, considering the role of fire throughout the Parable novels.
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When I visit the show a week later, I'm struck by a hand-drawn copy of a job application Butler submitted in 1985 to be a volunteer tutor at the Los Angeles Public Library. “What do you want to gain from this experience?,” asks the form. Her reply: “I want to help.” This piece, along with the “To Acorn” works, form the backbone of Shaper of God’s second chapter, which observes Butler’s relationship to Pasadena, to its geology and geography.
Butler was one of our greatest pragmatists. She was a planner; she didn’t believe in correcting problems in hindsight. And, above all, she was an anti-utopian thinker. Gerry Canavan has aptly written that, “In fact she rejected utopian thinking in the strongest possible terms. She believed human beings were biological organisms with sharp instincts for self-preservation that had been honed by evolution over innumerable millennia; she believed evolution had made us clever but mean, creative but selfish and short-sighted.” Writing novels was one way to “help” us see how we are all these things—and how we can change.
The hand-drawn copy is one of twenty-six graphite drawings placed inside two large, elegant wooden vitrines. American meticulously rendered each in piece situ, on the light pink paper the library provides to its patrons. With exacting detail, the works in the series “Octavia E. Butler Papers: mssOEB 1-9062,” 2025, reproduce some of Butler’s IDs, printed matter she archived (such as bus schedules), and several maps (such as one she drew of living arrangements for the Acorn community). Together, they radiate archive fever, which I’m sure American felt—the excitement and anticipation one feels while digging through a subject’s papers, and gratitude if the files are abundant. Butler was always her own best archivist, constantly aware that if she wasn’t doing the work, it might not happen. American’s painstaking detail likewise prompts questions about her public reception, such as why she was excluded until relatively recently from the canons of great literature.
A nearby work departs from this mimetic approach and moves into meditation. It also brings us to Shaper of God’s final chapter, which encompasses space exploration, colonization, and alternative desire. The two-channel HD video The Monophobic Response, 2024, imagines the Earthseeders as they test a static rocket engine using methanol and oxygen tanks. Butler wrote that the community had plans to “take root among the stars.” She had a lingering curiosity about life on other planets, but also a heightened awareness, again, of human fallibility. “If we survive,” she once told Larry McAfferty, “We have a whole solar system to grow up in. And we can use the stresses of learning to travel in space and live elsewhere—stresses that will harness our energies until we’ve had time to mature.”
The work takes its title from a short essay Butler wrote on the fear of otherness, and how humanity relentlessly imposes it. “When we are adults and past the age of having our parents come running when we cry, our only help is ourselves and one another,” she notes, adding, “Yes, this is far too much reality . . . No wonder we often project alienness onto one another.” Intriguingly, what we see in American’s video is quite the opposite: a loving, established collective doing everything they can to survive—a glimmer of optimism.
To create the videos, American brought together a cast of artists, rocket engineers, and Butler scholars to film on site in the Mojave Test Area, a three-hour drive from Los Angeles. The components for the engine seen in the work—including tanks, sandbags, and hoses—are on view in the show, too, and reference a rocket engine built by students of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Lab in 1936. Tests for the designs originally occurred in the Arroyo Seco Canyon near Altadena. It’s not far from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and its archives, where American found pencil sketches by artist and aeronautical engineer Frank Malina to base the work on.
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The elements that crisscross between Shaper of God’s three chapters, and that permeate throughout all of Butler and American’s output so far—fire, space, police, looting—are subjects at once timely and perennial. Both artists recognized patterns and made historical connections to create their work, while also allowing room for repair, for a different future. To be sure, Butler’s writing always feels like it wants to mend instead of tear down. Often her stories are narratives of rebuilding, renewal, and regrowth.
In an afterword to “Speech Sounds,” Butler writes that the narrative was “conceived in weariness, depression, and sorrow”—emotions many of us held at the start of 2025. “I began the story feeling little hope or liking for the human species, but by the time I reached the end of it, my hope had come back. It always seems to do that.” Why? Because her clear-eyed view of humans as clever but mean, creative but selfish and short-sighted was never pessimistic. She may have been disappointed, but it seems she was never nihilistic, melancholic, or of the point of view that things can’t change.
American’s show mirrors this ethos. A rocket could be used for the colonization of space or as a toy for billionaires, but it could also be built by a group like the Earthseeders who refuse to project alienness onto others, and who understand that the horrors of the past could have happened differently. Such reparative thinking is at the heart of Shaper of God and all of Butler’s work. It’s exactly the type of mindset needed to survive the fires this time, the fires next time, and beyond—within a practice built on foundations, not urgency. ♦
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