NOMA’s ‘Ten Years Gone’ reflects on Katrina’s 10th Anniv.

15th June 2015   ·   0 Comments

By Fritz Esker
Contributing Writer

Ten Years Gone, an art exhibition marking the 10th anniv­ersary of Hurricane Katrina, will be on display from now until September 7 at the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) in City Park.

It’s important to note that Ten Years Gone is not a documentary exhibit. There are no photos of destroyed homes or terrified New Orleans residents waiting to be rescued. Instead, the show brings together six artists whose works touch on broad themes relating to the 2005 disaster.

Russell Lord, Freeman Family Curator of Photographs, Prints, and Drawings, said discussions for how NOMA would honor Hurricane Katrina’s 10th anniversary began a couple of years ago. Museum officials knew they didn’t want to rehash photos and videos depicting the immediate aftermath of the levee breaches. Aside from the fact that locals are likely to be inundated with such imagery on television this summer, NOMA itself had run documentary exhibits on Katrina in 2006 and 2011.

NOMA’s team ultimately decided that the exhibit would feature works of art that focused on four themes: the passage of time, memory, loss, and transformation. Lord said these are things people think about on any anniversary, even on one as simple as a birthday or a high school reunion.

“We wanted to create an exhibition that not only honors this particular anniversary, but also considers how and why communities and individuals commemorate significant moments in a broader sense,” said Susan M. Taylor, director of NOMA. “Ten Years Gone” invites our visitors to consider the present moment as both an ending and a beginning, a chance to reflect on the past but also engage with the future.”

The pieces of “Ten Years Gone” are scattered throughout the museum and intermingled with the other artworks. The placement is intentional.

“It’s about disrupting the typical gallery experience to remind people of this event and the constant ecological question of living on the coast,” said Lord.

One of the pieces is Dawn DeDeaux’s Water Markers, photographic images of water placed within tall, polished acrylic slabs. Each image is a different height, representing a water mark reached in New Orleans during the flooding caused by the levee failures. None of the marks have a neighborhood label; it’s deliberately left ambiguous.

Isabelle Hayeur’s Underworlds series, located in the Great Hall, features pictures taken from a camera with a watertight encasement that simultaneously displays images below and above the water’s surface. In the photos, the underwater images dwarf the buildings and structures above.

“It invokes an issue that was a factor in Hurricane Katrina – the clash between nature and culture,” said Lord.

In Hayeur’s work, the water looks both alluring and threatening, underlining the uneasy relationship coastal cities across America, whether it’s New Orleans, Gulfport, Mobile, Miami, or New York City, have with their proximity to water.

“Water is alluring and threatening,” Lord said. “It’s the reason for (New Orleans)’ existence, but it’s also why the city almost disappeared.”

Sculptor Willie Birch noticed small mounds of packed mud appearing in his backyard shortly after Hurricane Katrina. They were crawfish mounds, small temporary dwellings crawfish use to survive while traveling to a new home. Birch viewed them as symbols for the displacement of New Orleanians. He cast the mounds in bronze, which are part of the “Ten Years Gone” exhibit.

The exhibition also features The Brown Sisters, which focuses on the passage of time. In 1975, Nicholas Nixon photographed his wife and her three sisters. Every year since, he’s taken another picture of them. All 40 of Nixon’s pictures are on display in the exhibit. The images’ progression shows the toll time exacted on the sisters, as their posture shifts from defiant independence to greater reliance on each other.

Spring Hurlbut’s video piece, “Airborne,” opens with the artist opening a container whose smoke-like contents drift into the air and dissipate over the course of several minutes. The “smoke” is actually ash particles from people who were cremated and gave Hurlbut permission to use their ashes for artistic purposes. The piece is a reminder of how death is a part of everyone’s journey, and how traces of the departed linger long after they’re gone.

The final piece of the exhibition is Christopher Saucedo’s “Floating World Trade Center.” In it, tufts of white linen pulp are pressed into deep blue cotton paper. In each part of Saucedo’s work, the white linen resembles the iconic towers of the World Trade Center. Set on the blue backdrop, the buildings seem to be floating through space. Saucedo’s brother was a fireman who died on 9/11 in one of the collapsing towers. The work memorializes both Saucedo’s sibling and the architecture itself, which the artist and his brothers witnessed the laying of the foundation.

As a whole, the works are meant to prompt reflection about New Orleans’ journey over the past 10 years and how the city’s struggles are both specific and universal.

“It is only with the passage of time that the way these events define us becomes clear and in the scope of the city’s history, ten years is a small crucible by which to measure the successes or failures of any recovery,” said Lord. “Ten Years Gone includes several works that are about time itself, asking us to take a longer view at this pivotal moment.”

This article originally published in the June 15, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.