TEN YEARS AFTER KATRINA:
REMEMBERING LIKE IT WAS YESTERDAY
VAUGHN CULTURAL CENTER AT THE URBAN LEAGUE OF METROPOLITAN ST. LOUIS
The unwelcome arrival of Hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005 was soon to become just the beginning of a horrifying story. In the days that followed, the world watched as our government “response” failed its own people and the flooding from the storm surge became the worst civil engineering disaster in U.S. history. The political and protective infrastructure of New Orleans fell apart, leaving thousands of people at the mercy of a flooded city. Fueled with enough sociopolitical content to last a lifetime, many artists near and far have created work responding to the devastation Katrina supplied. The work of Joy L. Wade, Robert A. Ketchens, and Marilyn L. Robinson accompanied by the poetry of curator Freida Wheaton at the Vaughn Cultural Center provided a compelling review of that terrible time. Ketchens’ red and moody, Goya-esque painting, No Lagniappe for New Orleans, depicts Hurricane Katrina blowing in with the face of a skeleton and making landfall with a duncy Cyclops following shortly behind. Ketchens, who was born and raised in New Orleans, states that this mythical Cyclops is “representative of a branch of government that failed the people.” The careful details of symbolic and imagined imagery at the top of the painting are balanced at the bottom by a portrayal of Ketchens’ great, great-grandfather’s house and property. Shown half submerged in muddy floodwater, the house no longer stands in real-life. The dark and fiery reds of the 7-foot tall painting are joined by a hot orange message in the lower left corner. This familiar, spray-painted hieroglyphic found on the exterior of homes, schools, and other
buildings throughout New Orleans, signaled the date a property was searched and how many were found dead or alive inside. In No Lagniappe for New Orleans, we find the date of the last official search, September 5, and how many were killed throughout the Gulf Coast: 1,833. Joy Wade’s six mixed media panels illustrate the 2005 poem Refugee by exhibit curator Freida Wheaton. In The Land We Share, an insensitive expression on the face of a white guardsman combines with the silent scream and contorted faces of the black women barricaded near him. These images, fit for LIFE magazine or CNN, are enough to make a stomach turn. This documentary quality triggers recollections of watching these scenes play out on television. In vignettes of acrylic paint and collage on panel, Wade illustrates images of our American people being treated as refugee livestock and manages to reach right in and refresh the collective memory of disgust, terror, and helplessness. In The Dome, a monoprint of the Superdome is overlaid by a slightly stylized and chalky, acrylic painting of a man holding a baby and a blanket. This defeated and desperate portrait gives a face to the more than 14,000 people who were temporarily living in the Dome in abhorrent conditions during the New Orleans flooding. Wade places a butterfly alongside this scene, symbolizing metamorphosis and the “hope in everything.” Photographs by Marilyn Robinson speckled the exhibition, documenting the hesitant re-growth of the nation’s Mardi Gras capitol. Robinson visits
Joy L. Wade, The Land We Share (photo credit: Richard Reilly) 09 ALLTHEARTSTL.COM WINTER 2015
IN REVIEW
Robert A. Ketchens, No Lagniappe for New Orleans (photo credit: Richard Reilly)
New Orleans every year and has observed the imbalanced comeback of areas like the French Quarter compared to the Lower Ninth Ward. Each bittersweet image of celebrations, musicians and historical houses carries the weight present when we all watched with bated breath to see if New Orleans would survive. Ten years, ten Mardi Gras, a failure by FEMA, and a Brad Pitt project later, we see that New Orleans is alive and well. So is the memory of Hurricane Katrina. -Amy Reidel