Although it is important to recognize the personal context of her work, the repeated emphasis on Becker’s psychiatric health denies a much more expansive reading of her practice, which presented us with a mode of producing space for the self that not only emerged from internal struggle, but from the specific conditions of living in Los Angeles in the 1990s and beyond. It reveals a precarious way of being, born from a city which was—and still is—unwelcoming to the survival of artists.