|
||||||||
|
Artists
on the Run, Their Art Left Behind
The last grim image Jeffrey Cook remembers is the sight of a dog gnawing at a dead man's finger. "There was death all around me," said Mr. Cook, a New Orleans-born mixed-media artist. "Even as a 44-year-old man you cry." Fortunately, since his house is on one of the highest points in New Orleans, it suffered little damage. So when most of his neighbors fled, Mr. Cook stayed on, not wanting to abandon his 83-year-old neighbor, who refused to leave her cat. Surviving on water from a neighbor's pool, he spent his days making art from junk he picked up in the street and taking photographs of the destruction so that someday, he said, people will be able to experience Katrina through the eyes of an artist. "We were the only two left on the block," Mr. Cook recalled. "It was like living in 'The Twilight Zone.' Every day you learned new ways to adapt. Looters were selling batteries for $10 apiece. It wasn't until I heard gunfire in the middle of the night and saw the light from a helicopter shine in my window that I knew it was time to leave. My dad, my brother, my sister, they all lost their homes." Mr. Cook, who eventually made his way to Tyler, Tex., saw more of Katrina than most of New Orleans's small but passionate community of artists, who have scattered around the country, most either moving in with friends or staying in hotels. This close-knit group keeps in touch, however, mostly by e-mail messages, which have proved more reliable than cellphones. And since they have not been allowed back into New Orleans, most have heard only rumors about the condition of their homes, their studios and their art. "We're a strong, nurturing community," Willie Birch, a 66-year-old painter, said in a telephone interview from an apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which he kept when he moved back home to New Orleans in 1993 after winning a Guggenheim Fellowship. "We'll continue to survive." But many artists' works may not have fared so well. John T. Scott, a local sculptor who drove to Houston at 3:30 a.m. the day Katrina hit, thinks he has lost his house and his studio. "I have a two-story studio, but if there was six feet of water, who knows," he said.
A major retrospective of Mr. Scott's work at the New Orleans Museum of Art ended on July 10, and at least one-third of the 199 pieces in the show were at his studio at the time of the hurricane. The rest, he said, were at the gallery of his dealer, Arthur Roger, which suffered no significant damage. Miraculously, neither did his eight public-art works that dot the city, including a large, kinetic steel piece on the river. "It has survived five or six hurricanes already," Mr. Scott said. "And it still looks the way it did when I made it." Many in the New Orleans art community are worried about ArtEgg Studios, a building on South Broad Street that houses art as well as artists' and conservators' studios. It is about a mile from the Superdome in an industrial section of the city. In the 1950's, the 50,000-square-foot building was the largest storage center for food produce in the South. Locals know its three-story sign - "Everybody Loves a Good Egg." Esther R. Dyer, who has owned ArtEgg Studios since 2001, said she learned last week that a portion of the roof had blown off. "The biggest problem is water coming in and soaking the artworks," Ms. Dyer said from her apartment in New York. Since she can't get into the building, she hasn't seen the damage firsthand and is relying on reports from a cabinetmaker and a technology manager who stayed on to guard the building after Katrina hit. Arthur Roger, a New Orleans native who has run a gallery there for 28 years, said that his gallery was fine but that he was worried about vandalism. "Most of us feel that art is not a target for looting," he said. "But we all have big glass front windows." Mr. Roger has moved to Baton Rouge, La., where he said he hoped to set up a temporary gallery. "The art community is looking for direction," he said. "We are not going to be defeated." Mr. Roger and many artists say Katrina will inevitably change the nature of the art that will be made in the future. "The imagery has to change; it's inevitable," Mr. Birch said. "I was always interested in the street life, the poor and what is at the root of that lifestyle. Now my concern is that New Orleans will become a middle-class city." "The whole landscape of American art is in the process of upheaval," he added. "Between 9/11 and Katrina, I am seeing artists dealing with history. When I was at school we were concerned primarily with form. Now that's all changed."
Ron Bechet, a painter who left his home just before the hurricane hit, taking with him only a few supplies, like sketchbooks and a watercolor set, that could fit in his car, said: "We're all going to have to refer to before Katrina and after. So many of us drew on the city, its energy and its people." Mr. Bechet is now living in Houston, where he and four other artists have been given free studio space at the Lawndale Art Center, a nonprofit artist-run alternative space housed in an Art Deco building in the museum district. "The timing was fortunate," said Chelby King, executive director of the center. "We had recently undergone a major renovation and had studios that were empty." Mr. Bechet and Mr. Scott will be working out of Lawndale, as will Lory Lockwood, a realist painter who has also taken refuge in Houston. "The art scene in New Orleans was so vibrant for a small town," Ms. Lockwood said. "Now none of us will be able to go back for a long time." She said she was more fortunate than some. Her house, which is in the historic district, has remained dry. It's her studio in ArtEgg that she is more worried about. "It took us a long time to board up our house," she said. "My husband grabbed a computer disk with my work and the cats. I left all my supplies. Our lives were just chopped. Now I'm running around with two stretcher frames and a few tubes of paint that were in my car."
"It's a fragile time," she added. "I know I should be working, but I can't. I want to do something that takes me away from it all. But I don't know what that is."
|
||||||||
