Gulf Coast Report: One Year After Katrina

In Southern Louisiana, nature and man live together both peaceably and at odds. These are classic themes. I just watched one of our many hummingbirds feed. They regularly vie for food with the wasps and the chameleon or green gecko who drink the sugar water in the feeder on the other side of the window to my immediate right. Great beauty exists alongside crashing fright. The clouds behind the Columbia Pictures logo are our clouds, painted after the sky and horizon on Lake Pontchartrain. John James Audubon painted here, as did Edgar Degas.

This is August 2006—hurricane season. My husband and I moved here two years ago and the awful storms of 2005 are now part of our mutual lives. I shall probably remain in Louisiana for the rest of my natural life. What attracted and keeps me here is something I no longer find in the rest of my geographic home, America. Curiously, it is the reason I became a member of AIGA.

To understand the context in which I write, I need to give my background. I was born in Detroit in 1954 and earned my BFA in design from Kansas City Art Institute. I received an MFA in graphic design from Hartford Art School then immediately moved to New York City in 1978. Before figuring out that graphic design was “it” for me, I spent some interesting years at Grey Advertising and the PUBLICIS agency before working in my own design firm. I lived and worked in New York City for over 27 years. During that time it was not necessary for me to join any organization because the City itself was my network.

Once I moved to a much smaller place I came to understand the virtue of organized networking. A network is a family, and family is a mighty force. It is for this reason that I respect southern Louisiana, my adopted home.

Down here the influence of family is palpable; its force real.

Heritage is strength, and I envy the Louisiana culture because of this. The percent of residents who live near where they were born is higher here than in any other state in the nation. Families can trace their roots way back, and of this, they are enormously proud. Locally, I am at a loss to argue for spending almost $300 to join a virtual community (like AIGA) when a real one is right next door. Yet, as a New Orleans board member I try.

In my life, I have seen neighborhoods disintegrate, and family structure disappear. In southern Louisiana, family and community thrive. The environmental and social pressures associated with my new home are well documented and remain controversially so—with a few exceptions, I have chosen to give an emotional report upon what I am currently seeing and feeling. Life is complex. Louisiana is very different from the rest of the continental United States. Understanding this region takes human empathy and spirit that I fear most of us have forgotten or just plain lost.

People visiting New Orleans are awed by the magnitude of destruction. Even now, a year after the storms, there is mile upon mile of debris, open shells of uninhabitable houses and fields of weeds where neighborhoods once stood. I wanted to make the visual equivalent of a sound bite to describe the enormity of this. Working with Michael Wyshock, Assistant Professor of Art, SUNY Oneonta and Dr. Stephen A. Nelson, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Tulane University, I was able to come up with the following: if you take the area affected in the gulf coast from Port Arthur, Texas through southern Louisiana, Mississippi and into Alabama—superimpose it on the Eastern Seaboard over Richmond, Virginia, through Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City continue north just shy of Hartford, Connecticut—you will see how much land was impacted and/or destroyed.

In time, I will actually draw an illustration of this so that everyone will be able to see the area of destruction and persistent woes created by the events surrounding hurricanes Katrina and Rita during the summer of 2005. As designers we are gifted with the ability to visualize concepts from words and make them into pictures. From my description, alone, I am hoping that my peers and colleagues will be able to picture the scale of our loss on their own.

Notes and resources

For more about the region, I recommend searching for the work of Bob Marshall has authored more than 60 articles about these subjects. He has been a staff reporter for the New Orleans Times Picayune newspaper covering the outdoors and environmental issues for over 30 years.

Bayou Farewell by Michael Tidwell and articles by him on this subject. Also, from Motherjones. And, from The New Yorker, February 27, 2006.

A virtual tour has been compiled by Dr. Nelson.

An animated graphic of the floods.

AIGA New Orleans has links and information on the website.