Workspace 08: In Katrina's Wake
An Exhibition/Report/Call to Leadership
- Annette DiMeo Carlozzi -
How do artists respond to calamity? In New Orleans, in the almost three years since Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent levee breaks of August and September 2005, many resident artists—and a number of artists observing from the outside—have been moved by the still-urgent need for individual and community relief and recuperation. Redirecting their work from whatever investigation had meaning before to address these now long-term and persistent social and spiritual concerns, artists who had never engaged in community arts activities joined others who are masters at group organization and collaboration in a citywide, overlapping web of caring creative production. Whether through the commissioning of new cultural experiences that provide public forums for discussion and reflection, the inauguration of creativity workshops to provide encouragement for young people, the foundation of long-range planning vehicles to prepare for and respond to change, or simply the creation of works of art that attempt to chronicle and interpret the experience of catastrophe, artists in New Orleans have proven to be valiant forces in the recovery of community-wide health and the forging of a future metropolitan vision.
In Katrina’s Wake, on view at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin from February 16 to May 25, 2008, featured film and video, drawings, photographs and mixed-media works, as well as presentations of artist-initiated community projects by artists and creative entrepreneurs Luis Cruz Azaceta, Carol Bebelle and Douglas Redd, Ron Bechet, Willie Birch, Jacqueline Bishop, Paul Chan, Dawn Dedeaux, Jan Gilbert, Jana Napoli and Rondell Crier, Kalamu ya Salaam, Cauleen Smith and the Transforma/New Orleans Resource Team (Rick Lowe, Jessica Cusick, Sam Durant, Robert Ruello and MK Wegmann). In addition to works of art, documentary videos, audio recordings and descriptive texts, a resource table was central to the framework of the exhibition, offering archival materials, a computer with links to relevant websites and binders of related readings.
The concept for the show developed over several years as I struggled with my own feelings of frustration and helplessness during the disaster, and what I’ve since come to view as a kind of survivor’s guilt. I lived in New Orleans from 1989 to 1993, working as Executive Director of the Contemporary Arts Center, a Warehouse District-based alternative space that had been founded in the mid-1970s and that produced vital, artist-curated programs in visual arts, theater, music, performance art and education. 1 But when Katrina hit, I hadn’t been to New Orleans for a couple of years. I watched the news reports as we all did, horror-struck and dumbfounded at the incompetence and avoidance that attended the city’s plight. Despite serving in a number of small, hopefully helpful capacities over the next weeks and months, my engagement felt negligible. And I couldn’t believe the tales of displacement I was hearing from friends: while many suffered only minor losses, quite a few lost entire homes, studios, libraries, most of their creative output, the records of their lifetimes.
I finally tapped into my inner lapsed Catholic and realized I wouldn’t feel satisfied with my efforts until I got my body into it—I needed to go to New Orleans and labor in the city’s painfully slow reconstruction efforts. I asked my teenage son to work alongside me, and as it turned out, we ended up guiding a whole busload of high-school art students and their teachers on a service trip to New Orleans in April 2007. We tore down a house in Chalmette (a white, working-class town just east of New Orleans that was completely destroyed by floodwaters) and, back in the city, toured reconstituted art venues as well as neighborhoods that had once held important family landmarks—now vanished. And we visited with a few of my artist friends to show the kids how artists were faring after the storm.
Talking with two or three respected colleagues during that trip, I realized that many of the most dedicated leaders in the fractured, much smaller post-Katrina New Orleans community were the artists I had known and worked with fifteen to twenty years before. Returning to an uncertain future weeks and months “after the storm” (the euphemism that most use to describe the indescribable physical, emotional and social devastation of the crisis aftermath), they simply jumped into the fray. When it was clear that institutions—government at every level, the justice system, schools, hospitals—could not provide adequate direction or relief, individuals replaced systems, providing extraordinary leadership, plugging service gaps like the proverbial Hans Brinker, accepting challenges with little regard for their own previous plans, rededicating themselves to their neighborhoods, their friends’ neighborhoods and to a foundation of human respect that was rarely evident elsewhere in the traumatized social landscape.
For instance, in January 2006 in the 7th Ward—a neighborhood that contains the roots of some of New Orleans’ richest musical and cultural traditions but, post-Katrina, has been home to some of the city’s worst neighbor-on-neighbor violence—artists Ron Bechet and Willie Birch were key among a group that founded The Porch. This grassroots cultural organization, now establishing its nonprofit status and a long-range plan, has engendered multiple convening platforms, including summer arts camps for youth, neighborhood festivals and programs as diverse as an herb farm and ongoing discussions on racism, all in an effort to reassert core values of tolerance and respect through shared activity and empowerment.
And in June 2007, artists and writers Jan Gilbert, Kathy Randels, Jan Villarrubia and Andrew Larimer created a bus tour/performance event called Lakeviews, which brought art and audience into a decimated lakefront neighborhood as a rejuvenation ritual for an area just barely starting to be reclaimed. Dedicated to exploring the shifting concept of “home,” this one event, which culminated in a huge community supper on the site of a former landmark restaurant, was the first in an overarching umbrella effort that spans several years, multiple artist-initiated groups, and a national support group of collaborators, almost all of them arts and culture professionals. 2
In Katrina’s Wake was my attempt to report on the extraordinary efforts that artists in New Orleans, like Bechet and Gilbert, have led in an arduous attempt to move the broken city forward. What I saw there over the course of my research in spring and fall 2007 was brave, noble, stubborn, committed, difficult, complex, slow, determined, heart wrenching, inspiring and incomplete. One person calling another, setting up a meeting, discussing some more (when everything stops working, time is the most available commodity), asking resource providers to join in, thinking creatively about how to solve problems the likes of which had never been seen at this scale in this city. With a crumbling social infrastructure that depended on family to provide the filter against systemic racism, class prejudices and political corruption, New Orleans was ill equipped to cope with the forced migration and neighborhood realignments of post-Katrina.
Ironically, New Orleans owed much of its uniqueness to its deeply rooted sense of place—an amalgam, of course, of the cultural influences of its myriad settlers, whose very heterogeneity gave the city its potent cultural identity. Now, the city as we knew it is dispersed and displaced. Yet, as the arts can provide regular measures of insight and relief and occasional respites of mutual pleasure that cut across communities, so too have the efforts of these artists aided—and in some cases prompted—what will be a prolonged healing process. Case in point: Paul Chan’s project Waiting for Godot in New Orleans was political theater at its very best, offering a stellar production staged by The Classical Theatre of Harlem whose public siting and provocative philosophical ponderings prompted debate and reflection among communities who rarely converse. 3 And Jana Napoli and Rondell Crier’s Floodwall project—a monumentally scaled installation made from hundreds of salvaged bureau drawers—offered a poignant memorial to a toll of personal loss whose arc can be traced intimately, household by household, across the city.
As the city reasserts itself with new populations, and returning ones reorganize into a different mix, artists’ projects like these are providing much needed connective tissue. Developers, power brokers, hustlers and citizens are all vying for territories ranging from single, grounded dwellings to new subdivisions, malls and casinos. That’s a familiar scenario in the United States—we’ve seen it replay in Sunbelt cities over the past half century or more. What is insidious about this New Orleans iteration is that, more often than not, the players are global purveyors of a super-capitalism that threatens to erase all maverick energy in favor of a streamlined efficiency in service of sales.
Tolerance of the timeless, dreamy, improvisational energy that has so typified the city is in short supply in the current business environment, and survival is big business. Ironically, New Orleans always understood far better than more so-called sophisticated cities that culture is experience, not product. Perhaps the long-range planning sessions convened by groups like Transforma/New Orleans—who aim to impact the social and physical environment by imbedding the arts into all decision-making processes that affect urban neighborhoods and communities—can provide some measure of protection as visions emerge for the realms of housing, economic development, health, environment and education.
I was last in New Orleans in late November 2007, so things have already changed, no doubt. But between April and November of last year, research took me throughout the city’s neighborhoods, and my conversations yielded many observations about the social and political context of culture. I heard gratitude that an impressive insurgence of New York-based students, professors and private foundations were ready with funds and time before anyone else was; 9/11 taught New Yorkers how to respond, genuinely and smartly. I heard appreciation for the “voluntourism,” like that of my own busload, which has manned the reconstruction efforts that addressed the physical destruction; I met students, church folk, policy analysts, architects and people with daybooks as busy as all of ours from all over the world, volunteering for New Orleans, trying to help save the life of a great world city.
Cauleen Smith, DV framegrabs from the film, The Fullness of Time, 2008; 6 x 32 inches each; courtesy the artist; executive producer: Creative Time, New York
film strip captions: 1. …get so lonely…, 2. frozen liquid vapor, 3. fugue walk, 4. new nola, 5. about to burst
I’ve observed the virtual community of the Internet, the way it provided a lifeline to thousands in the wake of temporary exile, its unprecedented capacity to organize people and dollars and to allow expression on both an immediate and public scale. I saw New Orleans’ tourism-based economy straining to rebound, with every visitor’s dollars contributing to a job for someone in a still struggling household. I saw sites of neighborhood shootings, all too prevalent now on family streets, as gang tensions escalate with the relocation of former rivals on adjacent blocks because too few affordable rental units survived. I saw new paths of gentrification causing tensions between those who assumed territories for generations and newcomers eager to commit to stay, help or create, but hapless in their escalating service demands and oblivious to rising home values. (It’s time the art community stopped being a pawn in this game.)
Most disturbingly, I’ve seen a voracious consumer culture take root in the shards of New Orleans’ funky old thrift stores and now-abandoned down-low eateries of upper and lower Magazine Street. Café society, as I call it, is alive and well, and while that is great for the tourists and the folks who had resources to begin with and for whom the damage was all reparable, for their household help, coming to work on a broken public-transportation system, leaving behind kids to be barely engaged in substandard public schools and elders whose medical needs cannot be met by the few remaining public hospitals, the obsessive purchase of luxury goods at newly established boutiques (most of them owned by multinational corporations), as if to say “I survived and therefore I shop,” rubs salt in a very sore wound. If that long run-on sentence reads like a rant, it was meant to. The racial and class tensions in the city have never been more obvious, and more than one colleague mentioned fears of violent confrontations to come. On the other hand, for those who remain, the commitment to a new sense of black agency is paramount in communities where decades of status quo had diminished capacities for future growth, at least outside of the cultural arena. 4
In Katrina’s Wake was organized to give voice to those who knew the situation firsthand. I found countless examples of artists who are operating in new networks of activism and productivity; the show highlighted the interrelated efforts of only a comparative few. Most of them—Azaceta, Bechet, Bishop, Dedeaux, Gilbert, Napoli and Crier, Redd (now deceased) and Bebelle and ya Salaam—are longtime residents (though several now split their time between New Orleans and more stable residences elsewhere), while a few—Chan and Smith—are respectful outsiders. The Transforma collective is made up of both. Their work was introduced in the exhibition and on the Blanton website, yet it expands well beyond the confines of traditional artspace as these projects continue to evolve today. My role as curator was not to give voice to my own experience (although I do that here and did so in the tours I gave of the exhibition) but to provide a platform, in a well-attended mainstream arts venue, for their experiences to be shared and remembered. My hope is that we don’t forget that this shocking history has just occurred, that the local mood boomerangs between resilience and depletion, that the city is still in crisis and that community transformation demands resources, attention and the energy of brilliant and creative minds.
If the exhibition was successful, it will have illuminated a few aspects of the complex roles that artists can play in our culture. In Katrina’s Wake is one answer of sorts to a question that I try to pose to audiences who view my curatorial projects—that is, how do artists reflect the concerns of the day in their work? And further: how is art rooted to the moment in which it was made, how can it describe the multitude of simultaneous and differing perspectives that constitute the here and now, and how does it expand our view of history and challenge us to question and think critically? And especially pertinent in this situation: where does “I” stop and “we” begin? Not to mention the old ’30s / ’70s / ’00s parlor game amongst graduate students and idealists (myself included): can art be an instrument of social change?
Luis Cruz Azaceta, Outhouse, 2007; wood construction, photos, plastic bottle, stuffed animal, rope; 24 x 22 x 8 inches; courtesy the artist and Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans
Note: Thanks to artist/critic Kurt Mueller, Blanton curatorial intern on this project, for his invaluable help conceptualizing the presentation of the show and for his insightful editorial comments on this essay.
1. The Contemporary Arts Center survived the storm despite major structural damage to its facility and is now thriving, thanks to the entrepreneurial leadership of its current executive director, composer Jay Weigel. Renowned curator Dan Cameron is the CAC’s new visual arts leader, and his upcoming Prospect 1 exhibition promises to bring international audiences to New Orleans to view progress on many cultural fronts.
2. Lakeviews was, like many of these artist-initiated projects, tied inextricably to the efforts of several overlapping groups/projects that were featured in the exhibition, including The Vestiges Project and Home, New Orleans.
3. Produced by Creative Time, Chan’s project spawned another exquisitely responsive work of art featured in the exhibition: Cauleen Smith’s award-winning film The Fullness of Time.
4. In the arts community, one of the longstanding best examples of black self-determination is Ashé Cultural Arts Center, a vibrant center based in the historically African American neighborhood of Central City. Its co-founders Douglas Redd and Carol Bebelle’s sterling community-based efforts since the mid-1990s were highlighted in the exhibition, as were the techno-savvy creative writing initiatives of “Students at the Center,” a program in the public schools led by Kalamu ya Salaam and Jim Randels, which has operated for many years and continues despite recent severe school cutbacks.