The phrase New Orleanians use over and over to describe their city is “lab experiment.” The New Orleans of 2008—just like it was in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina—is a complex study in urban improvisation. Entire neighborhoods remain almost completely without electricity, FEMA’s infamous graffiti makers still scar scores of residential homes, and the homeless population has nearly doubled due to rising rent costs and the lack of habitable housing. For this issue—the second of our profiles of the contemporary arts of an American city outside of New York—NYFA Current visited New Orleans.

Despite the incredible obstacles that plague recovery efforts in the city, the indescribably unique “funk” that architect Allen Eskew describes in the roundtable discussion below is very much alive in post-disaster New Orleans. A new hunger for collaborative community projects is something artists of all disciplines currently speak about. Clarinetist Michael White describes in an interview below with Ron Bechet a desire to pass the traditional New Orleans jazz sound on to the younger generation. Most visual artists describe a newfound relationship with ephemerality, and not solely as a theoretical construct. What follows is the outcome of our attempt to pass over this issue to the artists of New Orleans, to tell their stories in their voices.

Ron Bechet is a painter, printmaker, and Chairman of Xavier University’s Art department.

Courtney Egan is a filmmaker and new media artist who curates film programs consisting of local artists’ film and video work.

Allen Eskew is Director of the architecture and design firm Eskew+Dumez+Ripple.

Joy Glidden is Director of Louisiana Artworks, an educational center and cultural incubator for visual artists and the New Orleans community set to open this spring.

(Left to right:) Ron Bechet, Courtney Egan, Allen Eskew, Joy Glidden

Nick Stillman: Something that’s become immediately apparent from speaking with artists here is how radically the storm has altered their practices. On a pragmatic level, the destruction of so much of the city’s architecture has almost created a post-studio situation out of necessity. Courtney, let’s start with you. Has there been a before-and-after effect on your work?

Courtney Egan: Definitely. I was doing work that was about—it’s hard to explain just because I haven’t done it in so long—the psychology of stardom. A lot of it involved images of the female body and the media—taking body parts of different stars and putting them together.

NS: Like The Chaos Hags video from 2003?

CE: Yeah. But after the storm I felt that this work wasn’t important to me anymore. I started doing two different things; collecting film and video work of other people and organizing programs to show around the country. My personal work became much more landscape-based, but still utilizing video and objects together.

NS: Landscape-based because nature and weather felt so much more relevant?

CE: Yeah, I thought a lot more about how they affect everything in our life here and how we’re totally at the behest of whatever the weather decides to do.

NS: Ron, you’ve been making landscape-based work for quite some time. Has your work changed in the wake of the storm?

Ron Bechet: Yeah, it has. My work has always been about issues of leaving and returning or life and death; issues broader than here and now. I think it affirms what I was doing, but it’s become difficult to find my path in my studio, by myself. I used to work long hours by myself dealing with my own issues and how they relate to others. Now I find that—I won’t say ridiculous, but—not as rewarding as working with other people.

Ron Bechet Search for Justice (2007) Charcoal on paper

NS: Allen, architects and designers almost always have to work with other people, so I assume collaboration has remained constant. How has your practice changed since the storm?

Allen Eskew: My firm had arrived at the point where we were a design-focused studio as far as the spectrum of architects go. That’s where we were. The storm hit, and I felt our firm needed to stand up and be fully engaged. The work changed immediately; it became planning, community outreach, and participatory design. For so many years we were focused on beautiful objects. Then the scale shifted and architecture and design became a healing process where the essence of the individual object was secondary or tertiary to the act of a bigger plan.

NS: Process became much more important.

AE: Yeah. I was doing facility and community planning six days a week and the process became almost like group therapy. Actually, toward the end of it I realized that architecture and planning was becoming a performance art because I was performing it at times in front of a hurt, grieving, sometimes hostile crowd. Part of the performance was having a meeting to advance the planning process and at the end of the performance, we hoped the people gained acknowledge of what the subject matter was, perhaps allowing them to see their battered neighborhood more optimistically. Because of the nature of the storm and the political abdication of responsibility, people were empowered to design their own neighborhoods. It has altered my practice fundamentally.

NS: Do you expect this will be a sustained and lasting phenomenon as it relates to your practice?

AE: I hope not, and that’s not to be negative. After working so long at making buildings, I don’t want this federal flood to be the reason I had to alter careers. I see myself expanding my ability, but I do eventually want to get out of the war zone of community planning and get back into making select objects.

NS: Joy, as the director of Louisiana Artworks you have this building with amazing facilities for all different types of artists. The upcoming opening of the center in the spring seems like a real opportunity for some sustained positivity and development in New Orleans’ contemporary art community. How have you worked to establish trust and relationships with New Orleans artists?

Louisiana Artworks Interior view

Joy Glidden: When I first came here I got involved with the cultural component of Unified New Orleans Plans’ plan and the contemporary visual art community became my focus. I started to do convening sessions with the artist community—including Courtney and Ron—and we’re still doing those once every couple of months. When I first started the sessions there was much more of a need and sense of relief that the group had been brought together. Now there are a lot of people doing a lot of things feeding into this sense of contemporary visual art community. My role was to just bring artists together to dialogue and express need lists and express how they felt about art institutions, how they existed pre-Katrina, and how they could help them post-Katrina. After that I did a strategic plan and an assessment of the arts institutions here. Some of the things we’re doing now at Louisiana Artworks are based on those findings.

NS: What were some of the artists’ needs you discovered?

JG: Studio space is a big issue. There are no small or mid-sized exhibition spaces in New Orleans that are nonprofit. At Louisiana Artworks we’ll have a video and media exhibition space, which is currently non-existent in New Orleans. Those are the really big things. The other thing that I developed is the Association of Contemporary Visual Arts New Orleans, which will address the findings of artists’ need lists and gave those findings to the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Contemporary Art Center (CAC), the Ogden Museum, and the Arts Council of New Orleans. Institutions are being confronted by their constituency so they can understand a little better what artists’ needs are.

NS: Ron, from the point of view of an artist, what are the most urgent needs of artists in New Orleans right now?

RB: I guess the most urgent need is a place to come together. And the “opportunity” of the storm has brought us together—more or less out of necessity. I think another need is studio space. It’s something we’re all struggling with. Personally, my studio was destroyed.

NS: It’s interesting how tragedy can make people open up to each other and talk more and share more. I guess if there’s anything positive that comes out of disaster it’s that. Courtney, what are the things that you and your peers need right now?

CE: We often do work that some of the typical galleries don’t or won’t show. I feel like the storm has provided me with the chance to get my foot in the door on the gallery row area. But still there are a lot of barriers to showing work in this city that isn’t easily consumed or easy to buy.

Courtney Egan Soft Spots (2008) Video installation

NS: Is that because of a quantitative lack of exhibition spaces or because New Orleans galleries drift more toward an aesthetic that’s… more commodifiable to a local audience?

CE: Well, they have to sell work. I don’t think there are many collectors—especially who are willing to buy things that are a little out of the box. And that’s because there’s not much money in our city. It goes back to a need for the city and the whole region to have some sustained economic development that will eventually trickle down to the arts. The people who work like I do definitely lack spaces to show our work and it’s a huge issue. The other area of need is some sort of media access center. People need to be able to share their stories. There are very few places to go to and learn about media and put your story on tape. Some sort of long-term story project would be a great thing for the city.

JG: Even though the sale of art is usually framed as a financial issue, a lot of it comes down to education and what people’s knowledge base is for the idea of collecting and what they see as collectible. That’s another thing we’re going to address at Louisiana Artworks in the context of flat-files: works on paper that people would be able to purchase—small works that would be inexpensive but would allow collectors to start to nurture young artists.

RB: I think what’s happened is that different constituencies are coming together. For me, that’s been rewarding; people are now able to talk about cutting-edge issues like non-traditional ways and spaces to show art. There was a young group of graduate students at the University of New Orleans that just decided to go out and do a show. They went out and found a space and did it. That spirit had gotten lost and we had that spirit—I guess I’ll reminisce a little—back in the early CAC days when I was an undergraduate. That’s how the CAC started: a group of artists got together and said, “We need to have a place to show our cutting-edge work,” and they found that space. I see that spirit coming back again, which I’m really happy to see.

JG: There are a lot more people who have taken an interest in New Orleans. People are willing to come here now. I know it’s a strange positive, but it is something that’s come out of the situation.

RB: And something that makes New Orleans special is the grassroots. Neighborhood organizations, Social Aid & Pleasure Clubs, Mardi Gras Indians… art forms that have developed at a local level that have influenced us all. To get in touch with what they mean to us now is important. For those of us who were in the neighborhoods before, we knew how important the Mardi Gras Indians were. Darryl Montana is going around the country talking about his art form. Now, across the country people are seeing the Mardi Gras Indian art form and looking at its value as an art form. That’s really significant.

NS: I want to ask Allen a question about economics and design. There’s less space in New Orleans that’s habitable right now so it’s become more expensive. From a design point of view, how has this issue been dealt with historically and what are some New Orleans-specific solutions that could or should be implemented to deal with the situation?

Eskew+Dumez+Ripple Areial view of Riversphere Master Plan New Orleans

AE: The resilience of the city is something I’ve become very interested in. There’s a body of literature by writers and urban designers—this is totally before the storm—who have been looking at natural disasters, wars (especially WWII) and many of them talk about the DNA of a city, or how to repair a city while still being respectful of its original DNA. That’s sort of where my work is going.

Since the storm I’ve gotten very interested in how to describe, in positives, the question of New Orleans spirit and authenticity and funk. Certainly there’s a New Orleans sound, cuisine, performance art (especially the Mardi Gras Indians and local rituals and dancing). This is our DNA. The contemporary visual arts scene, which I love to follow, is trying to find its legs. Architecturally we’re trying to find our legs in the recovery, and my greatest fear is that the recovery is “replica recovery.” That community and business leaders have been seduced by soft, neo-traditional replacements, thinking that the way to the future is through the past. The authentic is the authentic, and we have to find a way to recover without being fake. For me that’s a trick bag right now. When people are hurting and trying to get back into their house, talking about the appropriateness of shutter detail… Put it this way: if our city were a medical patient it would be in the emergency room. Sometimes architecture-as-object is not as critical as healing neighborhoods. I try to advocate healing without losing the funk because that’s what we were about before the storm, in all of our neighborhoods, across racial lines. New Orleans is one of the more unique places in the country. If in our recovery we lose our soul—architecturally and otherwise—then I think that’s a huge tragedy.

NS: I was walking on Decatur Street this morning and I saw these signs reading “BLANK SLATE 2008.” A truly blank slate would seem to disregard the funk you’re talking about.

RB: The concept of “authentic” is a moving target that changes and gives and takes and evolves. We’ve all changed and the world’s changed, and how we incorporate those changes into who we are as people is a significant factor.

AE: None of us ever imagined living in the absolute epicenter of the largest natural disaster in the history of our birth country. It’s like a fantasy game. All of a sudden we had to ask ourselves, “Do I go or do I stay?” Well, we’re all here. Going into year three, there’s a real sense of optimism. I’m not sure I would want to be anyplace else. While it’s totally weird and unpredictable, it’s like we’re in a live, active Petri dish.

Ron Bechet Reality Is Illusion (2007) Oil on shaped panel

NS: Within this Petri dish that is contemporary existence in New Orleans, is the experiment for New Orleanians only? How are people from out of town received and does the art community want them here? Joy, you moved here a few years ago. What has your reception been like and what kind of challenge has it been to integrate yourself into the New Orleans art community?

JG: Listen, Nick, I want to hear what they say first. (Laughter)

RB: We’ve had people come in and it’s been a mixed bag—some really great and some not-so-great experiences. It depends on the motives of the individual that comes.

NS: What have been some of the motives that you’re experienced firsthand?

RB: For example, we had a group of students come in to Xavier from two schools. They wanted to help us with some of our studio problems; getting junk and trash out. At the same time there was another group of students who were more voyeurs than anything else. They didn’t have a genuine understanding of what we were going through. They wanted to see if they could take back what we were throwing on the curb!

AE: Back in the Ellis Island days, New Orleans was the second-largest immigrant point of entry. I’ve recently started observing that the storm has initiated the second major immigrant movement in New Orleans. There’s been an intellectual migration: university art professors and also the creative class. And youth. It’s the brightest, best group of outsiders I’ve ever seen come into the city on their own. The third immigrant group isfrom Latin America. This question of immigration is going to be a great thing to ask 20 years from now in New Orleans.

RB: I tell you what, it’s wide open now.

AE: The young people don’t care about social caste crap. They come in and look at it for what it really is, which is fictitious reality. They treat it as theater.

NS: Is there a danger in people interpreting New Orleans as theater? Can that make it so the reality of what happened never quite sets in?

AE: Somebody said that the flood lifted the veil of institutional racism; of a class system; of a dichotomy between working class and old, conservative money. I think the flood peeled that back and all of our children will be better for that purging. Sure, there will be some unfortunate translations and bumps in the road, but the future of New Orleans in the summer of 2005 was absolutely questionable.

Courtney Egan Deep Water Marker (2007) Documentation of ArtInAction public art action New Orleans

CE: It does seem like the people who are here now are people who really want to be here. There’s no other reason to be here. (Laughter)

NS: Courtney, do you personally feel protective of New Orleans, like it’s turf for the locals? People coming from more affluent parts of the country may have more money and be able to more easily afford the scant space that is available in New Orleans. This is the essence of gentrification.

CE: These are definitely issues for people; especially people who haven’t been able to come back. But I’m not protective of the city. I also think people are very happy to have visitors come and see what the city is really like. Right after the storm… I heard a member of the Soul Rebels Brass Band put it this way: he said the media dissected the city in a way that was very disturbing and painful for New Orleanians. That intense dissection and the stories that came out of it need to be countered with other stories.

NS: So, Joy, what has your experience moving to New Orleans in 2006, after the storm, been like?

JG: I came here because I thought getting involved with policymaking and to have an effect in New Orleans through the arts was one of the most exciting things to do, ever. When I was in New York I was involved with politics. I was involved with waterfront development. I was involved with a community of artists. I had been doing that for 10 years already and was looking to leave, so the idea of possibly getting that here was attractive. I feel like I’ve had to break down a lot of barriers. I find that there are social structures that I was warned about over and over; that I would not be accepted, that I would have to be patient for that warming-up to occur. But I didn’t really feel that. Maybe I just wasn’t too affected by cynicism and was very self-motivated to help. I think the people coming to New Orleans now have to have that spirit. After all, this is a frontier. The kinds of challenges that you face here are fantastic.

AE: Eighty percent of our community, probably for the rest of my lifetime, is going to be a Mad Max mindscape, with pockets or hamlets that survive and flourish almost under self-determination. I think it’s going to be the new reality.

I certainly welcome and am enthused about people moving to New Orleans because they raise the level of conversation artistically and architecturally. I make the distinction between people who come to engage versus people who come to exploit. The Halliburtons and multinational political suppliers that were here to strip-mine the relationships—whether they’re consultants or service-providers or politicians, it’s the politics and economy of tragedy—there’s a huge economy there. These people chase storms all over and make enormous amounts of profit and political gain; I don’t have much tolerance for them.

JG: A couple of newcomer I’ve met who have had successful previous experiences in their lives have come here and tried to transfer that experience, and it’s not transferrable. You’ve got to live this experience.

CE: There is some “art carpetbagging” going on; people who have their own agenda and come down to try to execute it.

Eskew+Dumez+Ripple Proposal for "Make It Right" home in New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward

NS: What are those agendas?

RB: I think it entails something very simple: personal gain. Not community gain. We’ve had some people come in who seemed to ask, “How can I get a body of work from this?” Or, “What can I mine from this?” rather than, “How can I assist an artist in some way?”

CE: I’ve had great experiences with the opposite, too. People who have been so benevolent who have come down to help—people like Paul Chan.

AE: One thing I love is having firms from outside the city be given the same exact brief as we’ve been given and have such a diversity of response.

CE: What were the differences you found between the local and national entries for Brad Pitt’s project with the pink houses?

AE: I think there were five local entries. There were differences between them; we were not monolithic. I enjoyed seeing the international contestants look at New Orleans and make fresh, contemporary statements. Some of the locals made very safe translations. You can be safe to a point where it’s being merchandisable. I was seeing an even more conservative resistance at the neighborhood level, and a friend who is a family counselor pointed out that when people have death or loss or grief it’s often a time when they become most conservative. It helped me to understand some of the local responses, contextually.

NS: This touches on something you were talking about, Ron. Also Allen and Courtney; it sounds like each of your work became less conservative, and what I mean by that is that it not longer adhered completely to the values that were yours before the storm. Those were things you all said you dispensed of, which seems like a non-conservative response. Courtney, your work has become very public—not just as an individual but also your work in community organizing and getting the community’s art out there. Making a collective body of work available and public seems integral to what you’re doing now.

CE: I think Ron said what I also feel about working alone in the studio. It felt pointless and disconnected after the storm. The most important thing became making connections, hearing about people who are making films, visiting with local voices, and getting their stories. Seeing what they were discovering and finding was a way for me to re-connect, to rediscover myself in this city after the storm. Sharing them just felt like something I could do.

I went through a real crisis after the storm in terms of the purpose of art. I was asking myself the classic question: What’s the point of doing this? What value does it have in the community? Doing this sort of work was an outgrowth of questioning art itself. Eventually it started finding a way back into my own practice. It’s a wonderful thing to see work being made about how the city is changing, and I think at some point—10 years down the road—there’s going to be an amazing collection of New Orleans after-the-storm work about all aspects of recovery.

AE: In a different way, our firm asked ourselves the same thing you did, Courtney. When the storm hit, all of a sudden we were doing things that would never have passed our portfolio review before, so I’ve had to do some mentoring of the young people at the firm to explain why we’re working on some projects and explain that the linkage is not the end product but that we’re doing some projects because it’s the right thing to do, that the process is more important than the product.

Courtney Egan Passing (2006) Video on car door

CE: It becomes more about content than form.

AE: Absolutely.

RB: A significant part of my effort since the storm has been to understand who I am as a world citizen and a citizen-artist. I’ve been going back and looking at Goya’s “Caprichos” series and works that were significant in their time, works that affected others.

AE: Do you find that as an active artist your work is more meaningful to the community now?

RB: I find it difficult to answer for the community. I think that our community knows what I do now and they understand why I do it.

JG: There’s a lot more attention on artists now.

AE: I’ve observed that visual and performing artists are more visible now to a wider range of people. Just the act of bringing contemplation or visual joy to the trauma of healing is a very positive thing. There’s a wider audience; more people are coming out to events, even when they don’t know why.

NS: Is the increased interest in New Orleans’ arts community after the storm attributable to this thirst for collectivity that happens in the aftermath of trauma?

CE: I think it might have been out of necessity, too. Especially right after the storm, art became a way to see people and communicate with people you hadn’t seen in a long time and also to find out who had a washer and dryer working that day or find out whose home is gone but wants to go out and play music that night.

AE: I don’t think if we were all accountants and lawyers we’d be sharing the same observations. I think the general community out there has been interested in coming and watching the artistic community evolve.

JG: And deal with…

AE: And take it in and absorb it.

JG: What does art represent? In our culture? In any culture? Art is reflective and “contemporary.” It’s a reflection on the current.

NS: And it can be evocative—spontaneously evocative—of situations and environments in ways that accounting, for example, can’t.

RB: I evacuated to Houston after the storm and Houston for me was this vast land of homogenization. You go ten blocks and see… how many Starbucks? The same thing over and over again. Strip malls. In some ways it’s an architectural nightmare.

AE: (Groaning) Houston!

RB: But one night I went to a place called the Red Cat in Houston and Rebirth was there, a New Orleans brass band. It was such an amazing experience. Not only was it Rebirth but it was all these people…

AE: The tribe! The tribe gathered in the Houston wilderness.

RB: And it became real again. It became not only real again, but not just an intellectual exercise. It became that narrative, that story, that content. It brought me to tears. My heart sang because a connection was made again. And it was not just the band but the collective, the people around it—everybody dancing and knowing those sounds. It was about the heart, not just the intellect. Obviously we need the two, but the heart is important. It was a significant moment in the middle of my exile.

JG: To flip back to what we were referring to earlier, art demarcates history. It is the thing that we look to for reference points. It is that paradigm.

CE: I think being here makes one more interested in art as an experience, too. I’ve been feeling that sense of community more in an art context than I ever did before.

AE: It’s interesting to think about “content” as you’re using the word, Ron. In my studio, a language has evolved where we talk about “content, design, and delivery.” I’m trying to find a way to make visual on our website and in our portfolio “content” that entails going to a neighborhood and working with it to help facilitate their recovery. It brings great joy and satisfaction but at the end of that you don’t have a product. But I think it’s good.

RB: New Orleans has always been about that content; it’s a special thing about New Orleans. Narrative, story… what we may call Southern flavor. You always find a good storyteller here, and I think that translates in all of our art forms—that ability to understand story and content.

John T. Scott and Martin Payton Spirit House (2002) Commissioned by the Percent for Art Program, City of New Orleans Administered by the Arts Council of New Orleans ©John T. Scott and Martin Payton

We need a thinking that does not fall apart in the face of horror.
-Georges Bataille

The work itself is about the place and about art’s place in the place.
-Lucy Lippard

I confess: I am a process-oriented artist unabashedly convinced that the creative process can inspire psychological healing and affect social change. This is my bias, these are my concerns. This methodology has its roots in my personal experience as a survivor of trauma; the long dramatic tale of my life of survival is not of interest here. This is the story of how the devastation of my community, home, archive, and subsequent exile from New Orleans (as a result of the federal levee breaks of Hurricane Katrina) informs my work as an artist and activist in this specific post-disaster climate. Though I am neither an authority on the visual arts community of New Orleans (which is mighty and complex) nor an expert anthropologist of post-disaster culture, I do understand the value of being compassionately engaged in one’s community and how to cope with the socio/political situations generally found in conjunction with events of shocking crisis, i.e. poverty and isolation. Moreover, I am admittedly a woman convinced of the value of her vision—which means, I suppose, that I have credence as a type of authority here.

Prior to Hurricane Katrina I was making interactive installations in New Orleans exploring the artist’s role in the aftermath of crisis and disaster. My personally devastating experience of Hurricane Katrina only galvanized my commitment to this investigation. Compulsively haunted by what seemed unanswerable questions (How do I get back home? What use will I be when I get there?), the answer manifested in the form of what became my ongoing project, ArtInAction (AiA), which continues to reply, “Get out there and listen/make something to give away.” Let me explain.

AiA is a community-based project consisting of site-specific installations built only in areas of the city that were hit hard by the levee breaks. It began with Pink Tree Pink, my 2006 installation in the Gentilly neighborhood, and grew into what is now a sustainable and proactive movement. In 2007, 24 artists participated and at least 15 are committed to contribute in 2008. All of the work, sculptural or performative, exists outdoors and is ephemeral. None of it is “about Katrina” yet it must grow from an intimate relationship with the New Orleans of the present. With my support, contributors (re)explore traumatized areas of the city and cultivate reasons beyond the formal for choosing their sites. Relationships with citizens are initiated, permission is secured, and the process becomes emotive, unpredictable, and communal. “Unveilings” are promoted as fine art events, local businesses donate refreshments for everyone, and contact is maintained after the event is “over.” In this way, issues of site/place, connectivity, authorship/spectatorship, commodification, and the artist’s role are explored. For everyone witnessing the installations, the act of looking/seeing becomes informed by something other than tragedy, which begins a quiet alchemical process—transmutating poison into medicine, opening the heart to unexpected joys.

Elizabeth Underwood Pink Tree Pink (2006) Documentation of ArtInAction public art action New Orleans

Frankly, AiA is a simple manifesto and not original: art as action versus idea—egalitarian, social, free. And despite its obvious similarities to community-based public art (beautifully executed in the pre-K work of New Orleans sculptor John Scott in his Spirit House installation, for example), AiA resists gestures toward permanence in a way that public art projects generally do not. Ideally AiA art works disappear, as progress in all its forms (ravaged houses are finally bulldozed or nature simply runs its course) manifests. Witnesses to the appearance and disappearance of the work remember that change can be good, even reflective of one’s own needs. When AiA work is working it is delicate—virtually invisible—yet the positive effects resonate outward in ways that cannot be linearly tracked or contained.

I am not the first artist/activist to realize this formula in a post-disaster climate. Numerous related projects have organically sprung up in post-K New Orleans, driven by the passion of local artists responding to the disaster they have endured. Some of these projects were initiated soon after the levee breaks, others in the following years. Examples include Robert Vicknair’s The Neighborhood Project, a quarterly series of temporary group installations in vacant gutted houses. Home, New Orleans?, an ambitious multi-media event in Lakeview, was a resounding success for Jan Gilbert and her Vestiges Project. Ron Bechet and Willie Birch initiated the prescient “Local Heroes”, a series of screen-printed posters of local icons “exhibited” on telephone poles in the 7th Ward, free for the taking. On a national level, Creative Capital sponsored Paul Chan’s heroic public staging of Waiting for Godot in the Lower 9th Ward and Gentilly. And the Brad Pitt-initiated “Make It Right/Pink Houses” brainchild continues to bring radical progress to the Lower 9th Ward. Similar future projects set for New Orleans include Michael Manjarris’ Sculpture for New Orleans, the Prospect 1 biennial organized by the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center, and the Arts Council of New Orleans’ sponsorship of a series of public sculptures commissioned by local contemporary artists. The phenomena of this type of work springing up in post-K New Orleans is, I assert, the result of two conditions:

1. New Orleans provides an established cultural context for public, experiential, creative ritual (Mardi Gras, second lines, Day of the Dead celebrations, jazz funerals, shrines, Christmas Eve bonfires, hurricane parties, and so on, and;
2. Contemporary artists are realizing that concepts heretofore generally existing as theory are a valid response to the challenging realities of life in the 21st century. I will even hazard to say that for a certain breed of artist this is the only way to function in a world where uncontrollable and incomprehensible violence really happens to their personal and universal families and the sacred spaces they call home.

Sean Derry An Interlude to Stillness (2007) Partial view of 35 inflatable car bodies Documentation of ArtInAction public art action New Orleans

In November of 2007, Pittsburgh-based artist Sean Derry came to New Orleans under the AiA umbrella to premier an installation culminating a year’s work. For five days in the struggling Mid-City neighborhood of an abandoned Robért Market, 35 hand-made, life-size, pastel-hued “automobiles” were inflated via a sophisticated bellows system Derry constructed himself. An area once flooded with approximately 12 feet of water, this neighborhood—primarily blue collar, middle class, and African American—is a shell of what it used to be. Children walk to school on streets lined with rotting buildings, many businesses remain shuttered, and the homeless population (which has doubled in New Orleans post-K) squatting nearby are constantly under threat. In part because of Derry’s project, the Robért Market landowners were reinvigorated to tend to their property. By partnering with AiA, Derry connected with the area’s residents who generally do not feel welcome at galleries and museums and do not feel empowered to participate in the raging dialogue regarding the future of their neighborhood. Families living in abominable tenement conditions uninhibitedly interacted with the art, a faithful contingent of homeless people joined the team and contributed priceless skills, and local businesses donated food and coffee for the neighborhood’s enjoyment. Furthermore, members of the press visited and documented the event (and subsequently the current condition of the neighborhood), university students and professors held tutorials on-site, and established artists and art enthusiasts engaged with a struggling area of the city they might normally avoid. An all-encompassing sense of pride was restored and for a brief yet unforgettable moment something else happened in a place that has become synonymous with tragedy.

I suggest that artists working in site-specific, community-based, process-oriented genres, or anyone presuming that art that improves the human condition, will agree that this is a logical and rewarding way to work—not just in post-disaster situations but in general. AiA creates an arena in which the things we proclaim about ourselves can become consonant with what we actually do. Yet artists (and art administrators) must resist the outdated modernist myth that the artist is a neutral autonomous individual and that art’s worth is measured by the profits it earns. To those of who live in the post-K landscape it is graphically obvious that hierarchical capitalistic structures that Western culture banks on can be terribly destructive. In a world in which my favorite 100 year-old grocery store, family of lovable alley cats, hard-earned peaceful homes, and elders who only ever wanted to enjoy their porches can be obliterated in one day, I have no appetite for art that follows the same structures that, upon analysis, are revealed to be at the root of such tragedies.

So what is the artist’s role in this rough and tumble present? This is a gigantic question—one that yearns for an answer that transcends the familiar, pushes outside the boundaries of established mores, and puts the artist in direct contact with the complications and intensity of graphic emotion and real life. I believe that by bringing art directly to those hurting the most—by physically and creatively connecting with haunted landscapes that have endured mythic trauma—visual art realizes its grandest potential and artists are serving nothing short of a noble purpose.

Elizabeth Underwood is an artist and musician who initiated ArtInAction in 2006 while living in a temporary trailer in New Orleans. Upcoming installations and performances will take place in the Treme, Lakeview, and Hollygrove neighborhoods.

Kyle Bravo Helen's House (2008) Screenprint on paper

This print is an image based on the house of my friend Helen Hill who was murdered at home by a stranger in New Orleans on January 4, 2007. While the house Helen was living in prior to Katrina was badly damaged during the storm, the house she moved into afterward was not. Also, Helen's death wasn't directly related to the storm. She, her husband Paul, and their son Frances safely evacuated to South Carolina. It was nearly a year and a half after Katrina, after she and her family had moved back and begun to rebuild their lives in New Orleans, that she was tragically taken from us. Even though the storm wasn’t the direct cause of her death, I can't help but link the two catastrophes.

To me, Helen's murder was painfully undeniable evidence of the physical, emotional, and spiritual brokenness of this city. Katrina only exacerbated the nagging ills that had plagued New Orleans for decades, and Helen’s murder was concrete proof that the poverty and injustice that manifested themselves in a soaring, out-of-control rate of violent crime were very, very real. I read about my city’s ailments in the newspaper, heard it on the radio, and saw it on TV, but when Helen died, I felt it directly. More than a year has passed since Helen's murder, but to this day, walking by her house is a sore reminder of the very real suffering this city. It didn't start with Katrina, and it didn't end there either.

Kyle Bravo is an artist and co-founder of the New Orleans-based printing press Hot Iron Press.

Dan Tague Inundated (2008) Archival giclee print

The story of New Orleans’ faulty levee system is by now a well-known example of governmental failure; the devastation of the city’s neighborhoods is the monumental domestic symbol of the Bush administration’s jaundiced priorities. The New Orleans levees were originally designed by the US Army Corps of Engineers (beginning in the late 1800s) and constructed primarily from materials like peat, oyster shells, and sand. After Hurricane Betsy in 1965 flooded New Orleans with over 10 feet of water in some parts of town, the levees were raised to their present-day height of 12 feet. This defense, however, was ineffectual in the face of a storm of Katrina’s magnitude, after which 80% of the city was flooded and some neighborhoods were drenched with up to 20 feet of water. In many cases, the levees weren’t driven far enough into the ground, allowing water to seep under.

The real story here, it seems, regards federal government decisions on the allocation of resources. Shortly before Katrina hit, the government pulled resources from levee reinforcement projects, funneling it instead toward the Homeland Security budget. New Orleans artist Dan Tague’s print for NYFA Current is a chart of governmental economic decisions and their quantitative toll in terms of lives. Tague, a native New Orleanian who witnessed with horror the 2007 ceremonial unveiling of the USS New Orleans (an amphibious assault ship) along the banks of the Mississippi River, notes in his quietly scathing print the relative equality of cost between the government’s warship and the estimated cost for adequate levees for New Orleans, a not-so-secret history of blasphemous priorities.
-Nick Stillman, NYFA Current Editor

Michael White (left) at a jazz funeral for Danny Barker New Orleans (Photo: Infrogmation)

Clarinetist, composer, and professor Michael White is a New Orleans jazz ambassador. Early in his career he internalized the lessons of the older generation who faithfully maintained the tradition of New Orleans jazz. Now actively involved with the Michael White Quartet, the Original Liberty Jazz Band, and the Liberty Brass Band, White has recently been working with younger brass bands like the Hot 8 and the Soul Rebels in his native city to pass along the tradition, while simultaneously updating and personalizing that sound in his own composing and performing. Note that White is involved with advancing the legacy of traditional New Orleans jazz, not to be confused with, as he recently wrote in the Journal of American History, “its commercialized, comic, and bland imitation, Dixieland jazz.” White states in this interview with Ron Bechet—a New Orleans-based visual artist, a fellow professor of White’s at Xavier University, and a descendant of legendary clarinetist Sidney Bechet—that jazz should be considered an expression of black resistance, strength, and pride. Like all communities in New Orleans, Katrina dealt the jazz community a significant blow. White lost a vast collection of vintage instruments that he actively used, not to mention original sheet music of musicians such as Jelly Roll Morton. However, White invokes the tradition of the jazz funeral when talking about Katrina, acknowledging the devastating storm’s possibilities for fostering, of all things, rebirth.

Ron Bechet: I’ve been thinking through a couple of ideas… about what jazz represents and means to the city of New Orleans since the storm.

Michael White: I think jazz is one of the ways that defines the essence of New Orleans culture. On the surface it’s traditional entertainment or dance music. Under the surface, it’s very powerful music with a lot of social implications from the time of its origin, certainly as a model and practice of democratic ideals that African Americans were seeking in everyday life. Its freedom of expression and social uplift demonstrated how individuality and collectivism would work at the same time, and this had implications about how society could work to be all-inclusive to individual ideas, tastes, and personalities.

For the city of New Orleans, the music has always been a way of reminding people about the spirit of local people. Creativity here is a unique and special thing. It can be music or visual arts or doing the second line dance in the street. We see creativity in New Orleans in many ways—gumbo. I was telling my students today: the best gumbo isn’t in a restaurant but in people’s houses. Everybody’s momma cooks the best gumbo. Making gumbo in New Orleans is an art that has the same philosophy as jazz; taking a lot of ingredients that don’t normally go together and making them go together.

The first program I presented on campus after Katrina was called The Jazz Funeral. The jazz funeral can be a metaphor for hope, transformation, and recovery. The jazz funeral ceremony is a unique way of looking at death. In New Orleans the idea of death is a transition to a joyous place. The way we celebrate it—with slow and fast jazz music—you both honor a person and lament their passing but recognize the fact that they’re going on to a greater, better place and reward that with joyous up-tempo music and second line dancing. I think that teaches us to make the transition from New Orleans as it was before into another, post-Katrina existence. Things will never be the same here, so whatever this is going to become, we need to make that transition. I looked at jazz and realized there’s a lot of survival philosophy in the performance of the music and the interpretation of melodies. There’s optimism, strength, hope, unity. On a personal level, that’s helped me a lot. A lot of communities are down and people are suffering but we still have that spirit. Jazz music symbolizes that spirit.

RB: And how is that coming out in the new pieces you’ve been writing?

MW: In a lot of cases, they developed over time. There are 42 new songs; at least 30 are close to finished. It’s like discovering a gold mine and mining it. I’m amazed to know that all of that came out of me.

RB: They’re so diverse. This one cracks me up—“Bambula Hula.” (Laughter)

Michael White at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival Washington DC (Photo: Danielle Trusso)

MW: I changed the names of some of those songs. I changed that one to… no I didn’t change that one! I wrote it and put it down. It was good, but not as good as some of the songs that were in a New Orleans/Caribbean vein. I had two others I felt were a little better, so I went back to work on those.

RB: Some are looking back, like “New Dodds Idea.”

MW: Johnny Dodds was a famous New Orleans clarinet player who played with King Oliver in the 1920s. He was one of the best and most influential. Sometimes I would get an idea about a musician and a style they played and I try to do something that sounds like it could have been something they did but not something they ever did. So with the Dodds stuff I tried to mix traditional New Orleans music with other ethnic music. I was experimenting in terms of structures but also adding Caribbean elements. I ended up with three Dodds ideas. The best one evolved into what I eventually called “London Canal Breakdown.” The term breakdown, in jazz circles, usually refers to a kind of dance. Jelly Roll Morton had a song called “London Blues,” which was originally called “London Café Blues.”

RB: The first thing that occurred to me was where your house here in the city was.

MW: That’s what I thought about. I’m definitely not trying to do a Katrina album. By the same token, that’s the defining moment in the history of the city, probably the most important one since its founding. So you can’t avoid it. Jazz deals with the reality of life. There are a lot of different realities—the experiences of Katrina, the experiences of post-Katrina, people dealing with faith, people dealing with escapism. You can hear in the titles, which reflect my concept of the mood. Duke Ellington always said he was trying to tell the story of his people, the Negro people of New York. I was trying to tell the story of people and life in New Orleans today, based on my own experiences. So the song titled “Katrina” is not a joyous piece, but an emotional, reflective piece. I have a hymn called “He Leads Me On This Journey,” which is about faith. The post-Katrina experience for me has been a journey with different stages. Faith has helped.

RB: For the black community, there’s a saying. My mom always said, “You go as far as faith will take you.” What are some examples of how the city itself influences your music? For me it’s an amazing experience to go out there every time. You get caught up in the whole experience.

MW: I always write about people. Katrina made a lot of us in different art forms recognize the uniqueness of what we had and what we lost. It’s given us a sense of appreciating. I had tremendous losses in Katrina but I realized that I didn’t lose the most valuable thing I had: music, heritage, tradition, and the experiences and memories of older musicians. I was very fortunate to have several years of contact with more than three dozen musicians who were born between the late 1890s and 1910. They taught me so much about life and music. All of them are gone now, but their spirit is still alive, still inside of me. It’s alive in memories, and it’s also alive in the music I play. I try to combine what they gave me with personal experiences and emotions to contribute to a new interpretation of a tradition.

RB: And I think you can pass that on, to groups like the Hot 8 and the Soul Rebels.

Michael White Quartet (2006) Glenwood Springs, CO

MW: Oh yeah. We’re working on different ways of doing that. One of the things I want to show people—especially in America—is that traditional jazz music is not a series of simple songs, like “When the Saints Go Marching In.” It can be fun, but it’s a powerful spiritual music that has serious meaning. That New Orleans jazz language can still be fresh and creative and alive—and express contemporary life through the language of tradition. I have some ideas for the Hot 8 Brass Band… they don’t know some of them yet. (Laughter) One of the things I’d like to get them to do is to play marches. One of the staples of brass bands around the world is marches. Young brass bands don’t play marches; they have a lot of different parts and can be complicated. Marches in the contemporary style could be interesting. I’m maybe even working on a couple of marches for them.

I wanted to ask you something. One thing I’ve noticed post-Katrina is that music people are writing sort of nostalgic autobiographies. There’s a lot of emphasis on autobiography—people who lived and experienced NO culture. Has there been the same kind of tendency on the part of artists, photographers, writers?

RB: Not necessarily in the format of a book, but in programs and associations that wouldn’t have been made before the storm. Groups are meeting that wouldn’t have gotten together before the storm. What comes from that? We’ll have to see, but I’m interested to see that there are people coming together to do things that are programmatic. We did a course at Xavier called “Whole New Orleans.” The course itself involves Xavier students, Tulane students, and Dillard students. It’s called “Building Community Through the Arts.” They work in teams and with neighborhood programs and projects. We would never have been able to do that before Katrina. There seems to be an interest in figuring out how to pass on through culture and how to deal with people in a humane way through culture. We’re trying to teach how to build a human society using the arts.

MW: One interesting thing that’s happened post-Katrina is that some of the younger guys in brass bands and older guys like myself started to recognize the importance of tradition. About a year and a half ago I started to work with the Hot 8. We did a series of workshops and clinics and they wanted to know more about the tradition of the music. Since then, we’ve done a number of concerts together and we still get together and talk. That’s been a good thing.

Brass band music makes you feel like you’re part of an extended family. There’s a feeling of community that kind of erases a lot of things; it makes you forget your economic status or what’s going on in the world around you. That sustains you, it gives you something else to focus on. It’s taking you psychologically to another existence.

RB: And you have a special place within a community that’s yours. In the visual arts community, younger artists and more established artists have gotten together more now than ever before.

Michael White with the Original Liberty Jazz Band

MW: One of the interesting aspects of that is how many people were displaced. It made you realize how special we were when everyone was in Houston or Atlanta or Baton Rouge. It made you realize that nothing was happening here! No gumbo culture, no sense of communal understanding. When you’re in New Orleans it’s almost like you understand each other from a cultural-historical point of view and what you have in common can be expressed through music and dance and food. You just don’t get that fraternal sense in other places.

RB: Where people say “Good evening” and know your name. You don’t really have that in other parts of the country.

MW: Jazz was a great equalizer for a lot of people in the early days. I always talk about the story of a guy who cut hedges on Prytania Street; just another black man. What he thought didn’t matter, what was in his mind didn’t matter, his opinions didn’t matter, his intelligence didn’t matter. But at night he played the coronet. And he played it so well that he became known as “King”—that was King Oliver. In a symbolic and real way, jazz removed him from the level of invisibility and linked him with the status of royalty.

In today’s second line parades, poor people can become rich people. They spend hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars on that outfit they’re going to wear. It’s very important. And they feel respected. Music is a great equalizer; you can be poor, with any appearance or size, but you can be respected and accepted. I’ve seen dozens and dozens of musicians who might normally be ignored in society be cheered by anonymous people. Jazz creates a common spirit, and that sense of brotherhood erased the sense of loneliness in African American culture… which you see sometimes in blues culture.

RB: My former studiomate, the artist John Scott, said that the second lines are an example of tremendous unity and diversity; all these people moving to the same beat but doing their own thing within that structure.

MW: That’s what the music does! Everyone’s playing the same key, but doing it their own way. Jazz teaches you how to become an individual and have your individuality accepted and praised.

RB: There’s a group of young men who would do “buck jumping in New Orleans;” it reminded me so much of some of the culture in Mali. These guys would jump up in the air, reaching for the sky, and come down right in time with the music.

MW: African heritage is so strong and alive, even in this transformed state. It has become a way of challenging and redefining concepts of reality—it’s existential, in a way. Jazz music challenges meaning and interpretation through improvisation. A lot of dancing also challenges traditional concepts of existence. People do things that defy social order… even death. One example is these guys who dance on the narrow rails of the interstate: jumping and hopping all in time to the music. It looks like they’re about to fall, and it’s like they’re challenging death, almost making fun of it. It’s the same thing you see with guys dancing on rooftops—shingles falling off and they’re dancing in time to the music. And they never fall off. I write about that stuff. I see the symbolism in that. All of those to me are blatant examples of the extension of democracy. Of total freedom. Freedom to redefine existence: this is not a house, not a car, this is a dance party. I may not own it, but I show victory over it because I conquered it.

Michael White will play at the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center on February 22.

Allison Smith (2004) (Photo: Bob Braine) Smith is a 2007 NYFA Cross-disciplinary / Performative Work Fellow

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