Bruce Lurie Art Gallery
Earned media campaign and stakeholder engagement strategy for the reopening of a Los Angeles fine arts gallery impacted by the Pacific Palisades wildfire.
Situation
Bruce Lurie Gallery was the only fine arts gallery in the Pacific Palisades. When the January 2025 fires swept through the area, the gallery lost both its physical location and the majority of its art collection, joining the thousands of residents and businesses devastated by one of the most destructive wildfires in Los Angeles’ history.
Immediately following the fire, a fellow Palisades resident generously stepped forward and offered the gallery a new space in Santa Monica. Three months later, Bruce Lurie Gallery was among the first affected businesses to reopen. Lurie approached Miller Ink to build visibility for the reopening and help reestablish the gallery’s presence when attention across Los Angeles was fragmented, and competition for media coverage of fire recovery stories was intense.
Approach
Miller Ink worked with Bruce Lurie to center the gallery’s human story, crafting a press release that brought the emotional weight of the loss and the triumph of its return to the forefront. Rather than treating it as a standard arts announcement, we framed it as a recovery story, one that spoke to a community rebuilding after tragedy.
Miller Ink executed a deliberate, dual-track media outreach strategy to target reporters covering the Palisades fires and the Los Angeles arts and culture beat. This approach ensured the story reached audiences invested in community rebuilding, as well as those following the local art scene, maximizing relevance and placement potential at a moment when the gallery needed visibility after a devastating loss.
Impact
The gallery’s reopening drew hundreds of attendees, and the event was covered by a wide range of Los Angeles media, including the Los Angeles Times, LAist, Spectrum News, Santa Monica Mirror and others, placing Bruce Lurie Gallery’s story in front of thousands of readers and viewers across the region.
The media coverage also caught the attention of American businessman and developer Rick Caruso, who arranged for one of the few surviving sculptures to be installed at his Palisades Village shopping center as a tribute to the gallery’s legacy within the community.