When I had my first exhibition in Los Angeles in early 2017, I visited 1421 Laveta Terrace for the first time. I had heard stories about parties and gatherings in the house, there was something almost mythological about the place, but I wasn't sure what to expect.
But when I walked through the gate and was welcomed by Durk Dehner, I understood immediately that this was a place that offered much more than the stories suggested. After the personal tour Durk gave me, I spent time in the gardens with the artists who happened to be there that day. I remember leaving with a very specific feeling: I wanted to come back. I wanted to live there. I wanted to make work there.
In the summer of 2017, I randomly ran into Durk on a street in Berlin. We talked for a long time, and somewhere in that conversation he invited me to come to Los Angeles as an artist in residence and spend three months at the house. A few months later, in December 2017, I flew back to Los Angeles and began my first residency at the Tom of Finland Foundation.
Like many of us, I had grown up with Tom's work. I had seen one of his original drawings years earlier at the ICA in London, but I was not prepared for what it meant to suddenly be surrounded by so many of them. To have access to the original drawings, to see the paper, the marks, the corrections, the precision of the line. To be able to sit with the work and study not only what Tom had drawn, but how he had drawn it.
That experience changed my own work practice.
It is difficult to explain exactly how. Residencies are often described in terms of time and space: three months away from ordinary obligations, a studio, a bed, a garden and the possibility of concentrating. But the Artist residency at the Tom house was something else. The house itself was part of the practice. The archive was part of the practice. The artists passing through were part of it. The conversations, dinners, unexpected encounters, the history contained in the rooms, all of it entered into the work.
There was no hard line between the Foundation and the house. They formed a unity.
This is what made the experience so unusual, and so difficult to reproduce elsewhere. The Tom of Finland Foundation was not simply an institution that happened to occupy a house. The house was not simply a beautiful historical property belonging to an institution. Together they had become something organic: a living environment in which Tom's legacy could be encountered not as a monument but as something still moving, still producing encounters between people and ideas.
I remember the gardens as much as I remember the drawings. I remember conversations that began without any particular purpose and continued late into the evening. I remember meeting artists whose work I would later follow, and people whose names meant something to me before I met them. I remember the strange and productive feeling of being temporarily inside a history that was still being written.
That generosity mattered.
The residency gave me permission to work differently. It reminded me that artistic practice does not only happen in the studio. It happens through proximity. Through looking. Through conversation. Through seeing how another artist worked. Through being in a place where the boundaries between private life, artistic life, community and archive are unusually porous.
I returned from the residency with changes in my work that have remained with me. Some were conscious, some were not. But the experience became part of the way I understand my own practice. It expanded my sense of what an artistic community can be and, perhaps more importantly, what an institution can make possible when it is willing to remain open.
This is why I am writing now.
I am deeply thankful for what the Tom of Finland Foundation gave me. I am thankful to Durk for opening the gate, literally and otherwise. I am thankful to the people who maintained the house as a place where artists could arrive without knowing exactly what would happen there. I am thankful for the trust involved in allowing artists to enter a space with such an extraordinary history and to make something of their own within it.
And precisely because of that gratitude, I find the current direction of the Foundation deeply troubling.
What seems to be happening under the new board threatens something that cannot be measured simply by administrative structure, governance documents, property, or institutional branding. It threatens the relationship between the Tom House and the Foundation, the relationship that made the residency what it was.
The danger is not only that a residency program might change or be terminated, or that the staff has been let go, or that the artworks in the house have been removed. The greater danger is that something living can be turned into something merely administered.
The distinction may sound small. It is not.
The Tom of Finland Foundation has always carried a contradiction at its heart: it preserves an archive while also allowing the archive to remain alive. It protects a legacy without freezing it. It provides a home for Tom's work while making room for artists who did not belong to his generation and could not have been imagined by him. That tension was not a problem to be solved. It was the source of the Foundation's particular power.
The house made this visible.
You could walk through the rooms and encounter history without being told that you were encountering history. You could look at Tom's drawings and then sit in the garden with an artist working on something completely different. The past and the present were allowed to occupy the same space. There was no need to separate them.
That is what I remember.
And that is what I hope will not be lost.
Institutions often change in ways that are presented as inevitable. New structures, new strategies, new boards, new procedures. Each individual decision can appear reasonable when considered alone. But institutions are not made only from decisions. They are made from accumulated trust, relationships, habits, memories and the particular atmosphere that people have built together over many years.
The atmosphere of the Tom House was never incidental. It was the work.
For those of us who were fortunate enough to experience the residency, the Foundation was not simply a place where we stayed for three months. It became part of our artistic histories. It entered our practices. It changed what we understood about community, generosity and the relationship between an artist's legacy and the artists who come afterward.
I hope the new board understands that this is what is at stake.
The Foundation and the Tom House belong together because, over many years, they made each other possible. What is happening now feels like a breaking of that connection. The new board has moved the art and the Foundation's activity out of the house, leaving the Tom House increasingly abandoned and disconnected from the community that gave it life. At the same time, there has been very little communication with the artists, residents, supporters and people who have been part of the Foundation over the years. The house is being treated as if it were simply a disposable location, while the Foundation continues elsewhere as an organization. But this misunderstands what made the place extraordinary. The house, the archive, the art, the residency and the people were never separate things. They formed one living environment, and taking them apart changes the Foundation itself.
I am writing this not as an outsider, and not from nostalgia alone, but as someone whose work was changed by being there.
I owe the Foundation a debt that cannot be repaid by a letter. I can only say what the experience meant to me, and why I believe it is worth protecting.
There are very few places where an artist can arrive and feel, almost immediately, that the place itself is asking something of them. 1421 Laveta Terrace was one of those places.
I hope it can remain one.
Berlin
Germany