This City Holds Us: Twenty Years After Hurricane Katrina

T O N Y   D A G R A D I

New Orleanians understand that when a storm approaches our city it is important to pay  attention.  We have gotten used to stocking up on supplies to stay, or packing up to leave or just making sure we have enough goodies for our upcoming hurricane party.  Many of us have evacuated enough times to be bored with the process, and in a bad mood facing the likelihood of deadlocked traffic crawling out of town.

Watching our favorite meteorologists expound on the imminent possibilities, we have all become experts in atmospheric pressure, outer rainbands, pumping station capacities, floodwalls, levees, and steering currents.

As Katrina entered the Gulf, those steering currents become important early indicators to anyone who was paying attention.  Many experts kept predicting that the monster storm was headed to Florida, but the wind direction pointed undeniably back towards New Orleans!  So with little official warning and horrific luck with our poorly maintained levee system, we ended up with the debacle of a flooded city and totally incompetent official response.

Heavy Weather was created from Volume 1 of The Encyclopedia of Climate and Weather.  The wonderful graphs and images illustrate many types of weather patterns and statistics, and lend a cohesiveness to the composition.  The collective effect of the graphics combined with the instances of “found poetry” readily encapsulates the chaos of the known and unknown elements we all witnessed and suffered through during our traumatic Katrina apocalypse.  At the same time, the clarity of illustrations and the analytical tone of the publication itself, provide an element of lightheartedness and hope.    

For the past thirty-plus years I have lived in the charming New Orleans’ neighborhood known as  Lake Vista.  Neatly located between City Park and Lake Pontchartrain, the spacious parks and sheltered lanes arranged in an unusual star configuration, provide a singular pastoral experience.  Another unique feature of this area - each street is named after a bird; Anis, Bluebird, Crane, Dove, Egret… all the way to Wren.  The bird streets!

Not only are the streets named for birds.  Because of the amount of green space and deep canopy provided by hundreds of oak trees, flocks of numerous species habitually make Lake Vista a stop on their migration routes.  It is not unusual to see long legged egrets casually strolling through a yard, or hear flocks of noisy black crows. In summer months, the gentle, rhythmic sound of mourning doves announce the rising sun.

When Katrina hit much of Lake Vista was spared flooding, but more than a few roofs were damaged and tree and house debris covered everything.  FEMA crews were busy for months clearing the rubble.  And ultimately, the migration patterns of birds and many other creatures were disrupted.

All of the images for the Sanctuary trilogy were taken from a single copy of Birds of the World by Oliver Austin and Arthur Singer.  For each of the three vertical columns, I fused five volumes of a vintage encyclopedia set, essentially creating a blank canvas to work into.

This was a healing experience in that I could imagine many of these same species coming “home” to Lake Vista and repopulating what I consider my own private sanctuary.

As with all of my work, each piece is developed from front to back.  To this end, images of individual birds were collected from their initial source and gradually added into each panel moving steadily deeper and deeper as the composition developed.  One of the organizing factors used in making certain choices was the concept that the birds towards the bottom were more often than not walking or sitting on solid surfaces, while those in the middle were perched in trees.  The upper third of the composition features birds in flight.  My goal was to create a complex texture while showcasing the serene beauty of our feathered friends.

E 2  –  K L E I N V E L D  &  J U L I E N 

Excerpt from “Before, During, After: Louisiana Photographers Respond to Hurricane Katrina”

Epaul Julien

Before Hurricane Katrina, I focused my photography on documenting New Orleans and Haiti. Both are vibrant places, formed by the cultural influences of the French and the West Africans. Through my photography, I tried to portray their shared heritage. 

On the day of Hurricane Katrina, my partner, our two-year-old son, and I packed one bag for what we thought would be a three-day vacation, three hours northwest of New Orleans, in New Roads, Louisiana. The next day, we woke to discover that the hurricane had blown through New Orleans, leaving tremendous wind damage. I assumed this meant that we could drive home to do the same serious cleaning and resume our lives. Anxious to get back to the city, I drove briskly, maneuvering through thousands of acres of sugarcane fields, listening to reports of the damage. Each report became increasingly troubling. As we sneaked around the winding river roads, I began to feel like a mouse trapped in a snake’s intestines. Then the radio reported that the floodwalls had broken and the water was rising. When I heard the reporters say that we would not be allowed back for three to six months, I stopped breathing—seconds seemed like hours. 

Although I contemplated sneaking back into the city by boat, the voice of my two-year-old son stopped me. After being cast out by the waters, I began to wander aimlessly around the country. Since I had left New Orleans without my photography equipment, I began creating mixed-media collages as we traveled, using the few photographs I had or could reproduce. In the end, I lost ten years of work, and while the discovery of mixed media collage has been therapeutic, my work will never be the same.

Elizabeth Kleinveld

I was visiting my family in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina grew in the Gulf of Mexico and headed toward my hometown. Like thousands of others, I evacuated the city with my family, but my great-uncle wouldn’t come. Soon afterwards, I returned to my home in Amsterdam, heartbroken as I didn’t know what had happened to him. 

I called a hotline so many times during the middle of the night in the States that they began to call me the Dutch lady. I posted comments all over, and one led to someone saying that former Vice President Al Gore had evacuated him to Knoxville, TN, and was in the hospital there. 

When I called the hospital and finally got my beloved Uncle Jack on the phone, I burst into tears—tears of relief that I’d finally located him! The story of how he was rescued from his front porch in the Broadmoor section of town and taken by an old friend of mine in a canoe to the convention center was like something out of a movie. Surreal. 

Uncle Jack had spent many afternoons and evenings on his porch watching the neighborhood and people go by. He was kind to everyone, and so it wasn’t a surprise that someone went to check on him. 

When I heard that former Vice President Gore had held Jack’s hand and heard his World War II war stories, I really broke down. That Gore had to hire two American Airlines planes to get people out of there because the government wasn’t doing it was utter madness. 

I think it was hearing this and seeing the images of people stuck at the Dome that made me feel like I had to do something. I needed to respond, but how? 

My husband and our seven-year-old twins had evacuated to El Dorado, Arkansas, with my parents and eighty-nine-year-old Grandma. When it was clear that we couldn’t go back, my husband, kids, and I left for Little Rock and headed to Amsterdam.  Mom, Dad, and my Grandma stayed in El Dorado, and once we found Jack, he joined them. 

Five weeks later, they let us back in.  I was astonished at what I saw. As the plane was descending, I saw roofs covered with blue tarps everywhere. When I got uptown, refrigerators with cryptic messages lined the streets, and the stench was unbearable. I knew then that words alone would not adequately capture the devastation wrought to the city, so the day after I arrived, I bought a new digital camera. Little did I know that purchase would re-ignite my passion for art. 

My grandma was the first person back to her street (at 89 years old)! She had been lucky; no water had gotten in her house. Jack’s house had over five feet of water in it and was uninhabitable. While he substituted his Broadmoor porch for my parents’ one and watched as people went by, this was one blow too many. Jack, too, was in his eighties. He lived another six months in my parents’ living room before passing on the Ides of March 2006. 

In the year after Katrina, I traveled to New Orleans six times, each time documenting what I saw. Photographing the devastation became my obsession—I felt compelled to capture nearly every affront I saw. In the beginning, I used a wide-angle lens, shooting piles of debris juxtaposed against the bluest of skies, which had a hauntingly beautiful quality. Later, I became more interested in capturing macro shots of the destruction or in singling out one item, which in some way began to represent the whole awful thing. 

My interest in photography continued, and my obsession with telling the story of how the storm transformed not only me but also eleven other photographers. 

Five years after the storm, UNO Press published “Before During After,” and we toured the show in the United States and the Netherlands, with support from the Louisiana State Museum, DiverseWorks, and Royal Haskoning. 

It was after our show in Amsterdam that Epaul came to help me hang when he asked, ‘What’s next?’ 

And with that, we put our heads together. We both felt inspired by the old masters we saw, but wanted to experiment and give them a new quality, and so our artistic collaboration was born. Fifteen years later, we’ve created over 100 remakes of iconic images, adding a twist. The work transcends Katrina because it touches upon things that Katrina bared open to the world, but that still exist today—that discrimination and racism lead to the have-nots and not caring enough about them. 

Some of our most recent work has focused on Rockwell’s The Four Freedoms. I don’t believe there has been a time since World War II when Roosevelt’s speech on Freedom from Fear, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, and Freedom from Want has been more apt and those things more at risk. 

I am terrified to see due process being abandoned and the democratic values I grew up with abandoned. As much injustice as Katrina laid bare, that seems to have only been the iceberg. 

Some of us will challenge injustices with words, but for those of us who can’t, we can do it with images, and we must.  

J O N A T H A N   F E R R A R A 

One of the first bodies of work I made in response to Katrina was a series of multiple canvas installations that toured the country with the 

New Orleans Artists In Exile traveling exhibition that was to cities around the country between 2007 and 2009.

When I was evacuated for Katrina and awaited news, any news from the city, all that I heard for days and days and days was “ the levees have been overtopped, the levees have been overtopped”.  This phrase played over and over in my head.  And considering my fragile state of mind, it was as if these words were seared into my subconscious somehow.

Over the next year, it was like loop that played over and over and yet I struggled to put a visual image to the words….I had not seen any real pictures of that exact moment when the water flowed over and into the bowl we call home.  I set out to make a series of works that captured that very moment.  That moment when things would never be the same.

With a mixture of sand and gesso and fluid acrylic, I developed a pouring process that help me visually replicate that fateful moment.  The mixture was like cornmeal and when poured slowly creeped its way “over the top” of the canvas and down the front, like the water over the levee top.  I was able to freeze the drip in time and as it dried, the mixture began to crack just like I imagined the levees had.  It was cathartic and meditative at the same time.  Over the course of the next year I made about 60 panels of various sizes using this process, changing the colors to vary daylight and moonlight, all with the same basic effect of recreating that moment in our collective history.
 

Offering

What do we have to offer this world?

What do we have to offer each other?

How to do share these offerings with the world?

Gesture is a big part of our lives even if we don’t realize it. When we extend our hands to “offer” something to someone, we are giving a part of ourselves, we are offering up a part of ourselves. 

We make ourselves vulnerable in this gesture. Palms open, arms extended, no harm intended. We are sharing something from us with the other person.

This is a universal gesture.  One that everyone does.  Simple, straightforward, meaningful and magical at the same time.  Whether there is something in your hands that symbolizes an offering, or just the gesture itself, it is powerful in its primal simplicity.  

And there is a power in the multiple as well.  One set of hands is personal, a large grouping of hands is a community.  One amongst many, strength in numbers, the collective will, all equally important.

I think that is all I have on it right now

I didn’t mention the mirror part yet because I have ”seen” it in real life yet 

If we wanted to tie this to Katrina which I don’t think I do , it would be that all those hands that helped us get through that terrible chapter in our history.

Them offering us help and us offering each other help.

B O N N I E   M A Y G A R D E N

Katrina happened three months after my high school graduation. It was that pivotal moment in my life where adulthood was supposed to begin, but instead I witnessed the only community I had ever known experience unbearable destruction. It affected everyone I knew and loved, and for me it was not only a loss of a material word, but a loss of innocence. A privilege that so many of us feel as Americans is that we are meant to be protected from many of the horrors of the world, but in the aftermath of the storm I realized how unprotected we truly are. The safety net protecting New Orleans’ most vulnerable residents was absent and the suffering in my community was something that changed the way I see the world. 

It took me years to make any artwork relating to the storm because I think it was my first real experience with trauma and grief, and it took years to understand and articulate the effects. However, I think what helped me and many others heal was work made by other New Orleanians that helped to articulate the shared experiences and love we all shared for the city.

R U T H   O W E N S

I was able to return to my flooded home two weeks after the hurricane had passed. Upon entering I was immediately accosted by a sickly sour stench of rotting leaves blown in from outside and wooden floor boards rotting in their uprooted gestures, escaped from their flat confinement. The flooding had made quick work of reverting our home back to nature, wild and dangerous, yet beautiful in its unbridled expression. 

The sour smell faded as I ascended the stairs to the bedroom that my young daughters shared. It was replaced by the sweet fragrance of girlie childhood dress-up play. Fragranced play make-up and perfumes still wafted in the air. This room never saw the hurricane, it was preserved entirely and ready to welcome the girls back. They never came back, though, and they never lived in the house of their girlhood again.

The painting, How?, 2017, is a self-portrait as a young girl smiling while immersed in sinister waters. And the question, “How?” does she smile in those surroundings comes to mind. There is hope in that smile, the hope that will carry her through the storms of her life.

A N A S T A S I A   P E L I A S

I hate revisiting the trauma of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. The City of New Orleans, six feet below sea level, endured the devastating effects of the failure of the levees when Lake Pontchartrain emptied into our vulnerable City in the days following the hurricane.

It became immediately clear that anything could happen at any time, and that we really have very little control over our immediate environment and our lives. The people of New Orleans were not protected by the powers that be, in this case the Army Corps of Engineers, who knew that our levees were unstable and that a disastrous event was not just a possibility, but was imminent.

All of the citizens of New Orleans were betrayed, but the pointedly inequitable treatment of different demographics - people in low income neighborhoods - immediately became very clear. New Orleans was exposed for its great racial and socio-economic disparities and divide.

In the days following Katrina, five houses directly behind my house/studio burned to the ground after an angry man lit a match and started a fire to punish his girlfriend. New Orleans fire fighters drained my neighbor’s pool, using the water to hose down my house, protecting it against the raging fire. I am grateful for that. When we returned to my house the surrounding charred landscape was a constant visual reminder of how much worse things could have been. 

In the aftermath, New Orleanians were displaced and forced to find another place to stay for an indeterminate amount of time. After evacuating for the hurricane, we moved like zombie nomads to any friends, acquaintances and family who would take us in. We tried not to overstay our welcome. When we were finally allowed to return home several months later, the apocalyptic post-Katrina landscape in New Orleans prompted me to rethink everything that I thought I knew. About life, about being an artist, about what it means to be safe. I couldn’t just return to my studio practice. There was real work to be done; demolition and repairs, cutting trees, foraging for food and water and unending paperwork with insurance companies and FEMA. Paperwork designed to wear us down and to give up trying to get compensation.

My daughter came to town for her fall break from college to offer support, to help me demo much of the interior of my house/studio, to take inventory of all that was destroyed, and to clean and then clean again. After we finished cleaning the walls in my studio I asked her to photograph me cleaning the already clean walls – the photos became a series called Still Cleaning. I didn’t know what else to do. Then I spent an entire year driving around the City picking up from the ground slate fragments from the shingles that had been ripped from the rooftops during the hurricane. Roofs that had provided shelter and protected the inhabitants of the houses were now destroyed. The inhabitants were gone and were not coming back. I spent the next two years making Fixed, a series of slate collages in which I obsessively tried to fit the salvaged slate pieces back together in an attempt to fix what was broken, futilely trying to undo the destruction that the City and her people had endured. Making large scale paintings seemed like an absurd thing to do. I tried to fall in love with painting again but it took a few years.

I’ve left out so many details about what happened after Katrina... 

Breaking back into the City with a man I barely knew — he stood guard with his shotgun outside of my house when I went inside to rescue my 2 cats, taking care of my elderly Mom, having to re-evacuate our temporary home in Houston for Hurricane Rita, the incessant watching of CNN news, accidentally ending up in George W Bush’s motorcade on a trip from Houston with my brother to check on friends’ houses and pets, falling in love, wearing only one dress and one pair of cut off jeans for 3 months, listening only to the 2 CD’s that happened to be in my car, Johnny Cash’s American IV: The Man Comes Around and Lucinda Williams’ Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.

Parking outside of The Menil Collection in Houston, but not being able to go inside. The only art I was able to experience was Dan Flavin’s permanent installation in Richmond Hall. The light installation required nothing of me but my presence and it soothed me.

My days were filled with ritualistic tasks and states of being. It is no accident that a forthcoming series of paintings would be titled Washed (to the sea and other waters), and later Ritual Devotion, a reflection of the watery landscape that surrounds us, both psychologically and physically.

The last thing New Orleans needed was a catastrophic event which would inevitably make the City even more nostalgic, more soulful. But here we are 20 years later, more nostalgic, more soulful. 

G I N A    P H I L L I P S

I moved to New Orleans in August 1995 to attend Tulane University’s MFA program in studio art. I graduated in 1997. Over the next few years, I taught as an adjunct at Tulane and began my professional career as an exhibiting artist, showing at Marguerite Oestreicher Gallery on Julia Street. As I became more enmeshed in the New Orleans art and music community, I decided to buy a fixer-upper by the river. I found my house through a HUD auction site in 2004 and put a bid on the property without even seeing the inside, taken as I was with the house’s unique location—nestled in the Holy Cross pocket neighborhood, at the crook of the Mississippi River and the Industrial Canal.

I bought the house for $55,000, with an additional $15,000 in renovation funds through the FHA renovation loan I had qualified for. I launched into the renovations right away after closing on the property in August 2004. Even then, $15,000 wasn’t a lot of money to fix a house, so there was a lot of sweat equity on my part. The house was completely clad in asbestos shingles—on the roof and over the original wood siding. That was the first thing I tackled: removing all the asbestos. I also tore out the worst of the termite damage in the kitchen area. I remember demoing a load-bearing wall in the kitchen and reaching for what looked like a solid piece of wood, only to have it crumble in my hands like toothpicks from the extensive termite damage. I patched the original heart pine floors and installed new hardwood floors in the kitchen. I also paid subcontractors to install a new roof, new electrical, and new plumbing.

After a year of hard work, I took my last FHA renovation loan draw in mid-August 2005. I celebrated by taking a trip to visit a new boyfriend living in Richmond, Virginia. We had a summery, long-distance romance going. He had been to New Orleans a few times, and this was the first time I was visiting him on his home turf. My flight was on August 23, 2005; my return flight was supposed to be August 30, 2005. I now think back on that week as the eerie calm before the storm. I enjoyed myself but also remember feeling like I was looking forward to getting back home to New Orleans to really begin my new life in my beautiful house by the river.

Well, fate intervened, and my whole life changed on August 29 when Hurricane Katrina came crashing into my beloved home via New Orleans’ backdoor Achilles’ heel, the Industrial Canal. That morning, I remember waking up and being glued to the news coverage of the storm. I saw a rescue crew floating in a canoe up to the edge of the pedestrian steps at the St. Claude Bridge, and that’s when I really broke down—seeing ten feet of floodwater in that area of my neighborhood.

The next few days and weeks, friends and neighbors checked in with each other for any scraps of news we could find. It would be several weeks before residents were even allowed on the Lower Ninth Ward side of the canal. By this time, my light and lively summer romance had turned exponentially more serious. I was homeless—not exactly ideal conditions for starting a new relationship. I ended up staying in Richmond with Louis, who, over the next few months, would become my fiancé.

We made a plan to get back to my house in early October. We rented a huge van. I wasn’t completely sure of my plan, but I thought I might pack up anything salvageable and bring it back to Virginia. Residents still weren’t officially allowed back into the neighborhood yet, but a friend of mine was printing bogus press passes, so we were able to cross the checkpoint by the St. Claude Bridge. I distinctly remember how emotional it was seeing my flooded house for the first time. Being a few blocks closer to the river, my house hadn’t been ten feet underwater—it was more like six feet (four feet inside the house, taking into account the two-foot piers). I was crying as I entered my front door, but then the tears stopped as I was immediately mesmerized by the bizarre system of chaos that the floodwaters had wreaked on my house and belongings. The smell was intense: swamp mud and mold. We wore respirators and Tyvek suits and emptied the worst of the flooded contents out of the house and onto the curb. I remember feeling oddly like the person who traverses a pristine snowy trail before anyone else. I was the first person on my block to start piling up the contents of my house out by the street.

I went back a couple more times before moving back to New Orleans in July 2006. I had a FEMA trailer waiting for me in my backyard. I was supposed to meet with a FEMA representative to sign paperwork and get the keys, but I utilized my Pop-A-Lock skills and picked the lock on the trailer. Opening the door for the first time was a shock: a thick wave of formaldehyde-laden air choked me and stung my eyes. My particular model of travel trailer was one of the more toxic ones. All the travel trailer recipients became well-versed in knowing which models were relatively fresh and which were toxic. I had one of the bad ones, and we had to get into the habit of turning on the AC in the afternoon and through the evening, then first thing in the morning, opening doors and windows to air it out.

Being in a neighborhood so close to the river, my house is located in a “good” flood zone, meaning we don’t have to worry about typical torrential rain event street flooding. So I hadn’t even purchased flood insurance when I bought the house. I can’t think of a single friend in my neighborhood who had flood insurance. I know it sounds crazy now, but we just didn’t worry about floods—that was a Mid-City/Lakeview, bottom-of-the-bowl problem.

Soon enough, my soon-to-be husband Louis and I launched into repairing my home for the second time. We had to navigate Road Home grant money, and there was a lot of uncertainty. I eventually received the full extent of the grant, and I don’t know what I would have done without it. The repairs I had made the first time had definitely strengthened the house, but having to do it all over again, I took it to the next level—gutting the whole house, putting in insulation, and even installing central AC and heat. (I didn’t even have a window unit before the storm!)

For a long time, I felt like I lived in Destructoville—that was my nickname for my neighborhood. For more than a year after the storm, you could still find houses in the middle of streets, and cars turned upside down or even perched on rooftops. We didn’t have mail service or garbage pickup for a long time. Most of the Lower Ninth Ward was still in pitch-black darkness at night—only the older neighborhood closer to the river had a functioning electrical grid. Then, crossing the bridge over the canal into “New Orleans,” life was eerily normal (relatively). It was jarring.

I had never attended any homeowners or neighborhood association meetings before, but after the storm, my friends and neighbors flocked to the weekly meetings for news and support. That experience was galvanizing—we were all in the same boat, navigating insurance claims, trying to get our Road Home money, and grappling with the controversy about how to rebuild the city. Many (outsiders) thought the Lower Ninth Ward should be bulldozed and no one should have been allowed to return.

Finally, I finished rebuilding my home for the second time in the fall of 2007. My house is pretty small (1,100 square feet), but it felt huge after living in a FEMA trailer for almost a year and a half. I finally got back to work in the studio, using my newly acquired longarm quilting machine. More than ever, I began to explore themes of place and did a deep dive on narratives about Fats Domino and imagery relating to New Orleans history and geography. Oh, and within a couple of years, my Katrina-induced marriage turned into a relationship-born-out-of-disaster divorce.

Now it’s been 20 years since Hurricane Katrina—hard to believe. Also hard to believe I’m about to say this—but I wouldn’t change anything. The experience is part of my makeup now and only made me stronger.

A I M É E   F A R N E T   S I E G E L

I didn't know it at the time, but Hurricane Katrina was my catalyst to becoming an artist. When I returned to New Orleans after the storm, I found a city transformed—scarred, resilient and determined. One of the most striking mediums of our collective voice was the humble t-shirt. New Orleanians from all walks of life wore t-shirts as their personal billboards—raw, unfiltered expressions of grief, defiance, hope and survival. 

I gathered 81 of these t-shirts from across the city and used my platform as curator of the Country Day Art Gallery to exhibit them. 

Each shirt carried a fragment of the communal psyche: some

shouted outrage at government failure, others offered declarations of pride, and some faced the

devastation with humor. Together, they formed a quilt of voices stitched in witness. And now, 20 years post Katrina, in revisiting this collection I realized I amassed and preserved a time capsule honoring our collective struggle.

While text and containment remain cornerstones of my practice, rather than sourcing voices from my community, I now search internally for clarity and meaning. 

My work is process driven. I build, tear apart and rebuild again layering text, form, color and line. Each strata, whether obliterated or excavated holds memory and meaning. 

My work can be monochromatic or multicolored; unstructured and free floating or stretched taut and conforming to the limitations of defined structures. They are 2 or 3-dimensional. Many are non-objective while others, including “Content” reference the figurative.

And, much like my beloved New Orleans, my work is constantly changing and evolving, carrying within it the ruins and the renaissance—proof that healing, rebuilding and flourishing are possible.
 

TRENITY THOMAS

My experience as a 6-year-old evacuee during Hurricane Katrina marked a pivotal moment in my life. The unfamiliar surroundings and uncertainty of displacement became a catalyst for resilience. From FEMA trailers to my great-grandparents' home, each new environment shaped my perspective. As I grew older, I realized that evacuations are a recurring reality for many in Louisiana. This awareness fuels my determination to persevere and emerge stronger, inspiring my artistic expression.
 

PAUL VILLINSKI

My work with vinyl LP records began in post-Katrina New Orleans. In 2006, I visited there to try to take in what had happened and to scavenge materials among the ubiquitous piles of debris. On a concrete slab in the Lower Ninth Ward - once someone’s home - I found a number of vinyl LPs, mud covered and warped by the sun, their round center labels rotted away. With patience, I cut these albums into large, black birds, then heated them to further warp the vinyl and fold the wings into form.

Many of my LPs contain personal anthems; many are markers of life events... To me, these pieces are about the thought and work of the musical artists I love floating into the world and spreading its influence like migrating birds carried along by the wind. It’s about the ability of this music, and by extension, all art, to connect us, console us, shape us, and to transform us in small and large ways - in ways its creators can’t even guess at.

For more information, press or sales inquiries please contact Gallery Director Matthew Weldon Showman at 504.343.6827 or matthew@ferrarashowman.com. Please join the conversation with FSG on Instagram (@FerraraShowmanGallery) via the hashtags: #FerraraShowmanGallery, and #ArtsDistrictNewOrleans.