Works of 'exiled' New Orleans artists begin tour of the South

ATLANTA -- The swirls of metal laid into the slightly cracked purplish wood no longer mean air and open spaces to artist Kathleen Brandon. After sitting under four feet of water for six weeks in her New Orleans home, the sculpture now reminds her of swelling waves, funnel clouds, the helicopter that evacuated her son.

Brandon's "Circling the Air" is one of several dozen works of art -- created both before and after Hurricane Katrina -- that a New Orleans gallery owner has taken on the road in an effort to revitalize the city's contemporary arts scene.

All pieces in "New Orleans: Artists in Exile," will travel across the Southeast from Atlanta, are for sale. Organizer Jonathan Ferrara hopes the proceeds will help the evacuated artists get back on their feet and re-create the city's edgier arts side.

"For the next year, my mission is to enable artists to go back to New Orleans and continue their artistic existence," Ferrara said.

When Hurricane Katrina struck Aug. 29, about 11,000 people in the arts have lost their jobs and uninsured damages are estimated at about $80 million, according to a report released earlier this month by Mayor Ray Nagin's arts commission.

Many artworks in the city were buried in water and mud. The exhibit's half a dozen black-and-white smoky, theatrical portraits of Ella Fitzgerald and other luminaries are among the few surviving prints by jazz photographer Herman Leonard. At 85, the artist doesn't know whether he'll move back to New Orleans, let alone whether he'll print again from his destroyed darkroom, Ferrara said.

The show also includes abstract ceramic structures by Sidonie Villere, colorful mixed-media presentations by Miranda Lake, oil paintings of books by Amy McKinnon, and black metal sculptures by Gina Laguna. Also on display are color photographs by Charlie Varley taken in the immediate aftermath of Katrina.

Among them are images of crying children, the crowds outside the Super Dome, people wading through floodwaters and a body wrapped in plastic, placed in a pickup bed.

Without dwelling on what's lost, the 20 artists represented in the exhibit have one major worry, their own survival. The art market has been wiped out in the city, said Ferrara, who is renting his gallery to a roofing company until 2007 to help pay the mortgage.

With the city's artists displaced from New Mexico to Puerto Rico, can New Orleans' contemporary scene come back?

"I hope to go back, but I still cry when I go through block after block of brown," said Brandon, whose lakefront house sat between two levees that broke and was stained by the multiple lines of receding floodwater. Those lines now flow on her large acrylic-stained canvases -- "water taking over just as it did in the city," she said.

Villere fled to Corpus Christi, Texas, where she poured her feelings of being confused and scattered into more than 50 small sculptures -- dark brown, drooping lumps of clay. Even with her fragile works in storage and no studio, Villere is now back in New Orleans.

"It'd be hard to go anywhere else," she said.

She and the other artists hope the show, which remains in Atlanta through Feb. 20 before traveling to Shreveport, La., back to the Atlanta suburb of Hapeville, and on to Miami in June, will give them a boost while reminding art lovers that Katrina hasn't obliterated New Orleans' creative spirit.

"Culture is the one thing we did have a wealth of," Ferrara said. "Culture and tourism should carry us out if this."

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On the Net:

"New Orleans: Artists in Exile": http://www.neworleansartistsinexile.com