Drawn to save their arts scene

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 4 feet of water for six weeks in her New Orleans home, the sculpture now reminds her of 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 beleaguered city’s contemporary arts scene.

All pieces in “New Orleans: Artists in Exile,” which is in Atlanta and will travel across the Southeast, 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 more cutting-edge arts side.

Artists were drawn to New Orleans by the city’s quirky spirit and reasonable rents, said Alan Gerson, arts instructor at Loyola University and a former director of the city’s Contemporary Arts Center. The city’s Warehouse/Arts District was beginning to gain a national reputation before Katrina struck Aug. 29.

“Nobody was really making much money, but you could have a great lifestyle in that you walked out the door and were bombarded by creativity,” Ferrara said. “Art was everywhere in New Orleans. Then the hurricane happens and shreds the whole thing.”

About 11,000 people in the arts have lost their jobs, and uninsured damage is estimated at about $80 million, according to a report released last month by Mayor C. Ray Nagin’s arts commission.

Many artworks in the city were inundated. The exhibit’s 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 the city, 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.

Without dwelling on what’s been 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.

With the city’s artists displaced from New Mexico to Puerto Rico, can the city’s 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 house was flooded. Those water lines now flow on her large canvases -- “water taking over just as it did in the city,” she said.

The artists hope the show 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.”