In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, putting New Orleans’ arts community back together was low on the list of priorities. Hundreds of residents died. Seventy-percent of housing damaged, much of it a total loss. Large portions of the city completely destroyed. Finding jobs for artists and curators and reopening galleries and hosting art walks and exhibitions again took years. Years.
Once that did happen, however, New Orleans’ arts community, particularly the visual arts–its music and culinary scenes have always been world class – elevated beyond what had been previously achieved. In a perverse way, Katrina is responsible for that. Global attention generated by the storm introduced the world to New Orleans’ fine artists like never before. The world liked what it saw. NOLA’s perception changed from bawdy Bourbon Street and wacky outpost of jazz and gumbo to an important stop on the international art circuit, an arts destination, a city loaded with talented artists making profound statements.
“We’d always known we had the quality here, we just never had the spotlight,” New Orleans artist and gallery owner Jonathan Ferrara told Forbes.com. “Now, you wouldn’t want the spotlight to come from Katrina, but it’s a silver lining.”
In recognition of the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, making landfall in Louisiana on August 29, 2005, Ferrara Showman Gallery presents “This City Holds Us” - curated by Matthew Weldon Showman - on view through September 13, 2025, not an exhibition of Katrina artwork, an exhibition of New Orleans artists who survived Katrina and how their art making has evolved.
Gina Phillips moved to New Orleans in 1995 to attend Tulane University’s MFA program in studio art. After graduating, she stayed in town, eventually purchasing a blighted house in the city’s Lower Ninth Ward sight unseen through a Housing and Urban Development auction. She spent a year renovating the home, then took a vacation to celebrate the project’s completion. Katrina arrived while she was away. Phillips is one of the Katrina survivor artists featured in the Ferrara-Showman exhibition.
She returned to New Orleans a year after the storm, living in a FEMA trailer in her back yard and started working on the house. Again. Other homes remained in the middle of the street. The Lower Ninth Ward was ground zero for the impact of the storm, the failure of the levees which were designed to keep flood water and water from Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borgne out of the New Orleans “bowl” where all the people live. She referred to the neighborhood as “Destructoville.” There was no mail service. No garbage pickup. Power came from generators. Over a year later. “The first couple years, we were all just trying to get our own shit together–like literally build your house back,” Ferrara said. “It was difficult to think about where does a gallery fit? Where does the (art) scene fit in, but like anything that happens in New Orleans, it happened organically. Art bubbles up, the music does too, the culture. New Orleans doesn’t go away. We survive against all odds. The culture is the standard bearer for that survival. It’s one of the reasons why people live here. We just started to do what we had done before, but there was (attention) on us all the time.”
Phillips and Ferrara both credit Prospect, a citywide contemporary art triennial and the first exhibition of its kind in the US, as continuing to bring attention to New Orleans and its arts community after the news crews left. The first Prospect debuted in 2008. Enough time for enough artists and art workers in New Orleans to get their shit together to the point where they could think about artmaking again. Phillips moved back into her twice renovated home in the fall of 2007 having lived in the FEMA trailer–a toxic one, another story for another day–for nearly 18 months. It took about three years after the storm before her life and basic human necessities were stable enough to the point where she the time–the luxury–to start thinking about new artwork and what that might look like. That three-year timeframe coincided with the launch of Prospect, a project supporting and highlighting New Orleans artists, but more broadly, thinking about what the role of artists could be in rebuilding the city?
New Orleans was being reinvented in real time. Along with devastation comes opportunity. Locals were disgusted with city leadership’s inept handling of the crisis. They were booted out. Artists held voices in decision making they wouldn’t have had before. “Prospect was an exciting time to be an artist in New Orleans and be seen on a national and international level,” Ferrara said. The city’s artists stood up and stood out. Unlike their public officials, artists met the moment. The global contemporary art world came calling to New Orleans for Prospect and left bewitched. New Orleans does that to people.
“I always said to people as I traveled, as an artist, you could not go through the worst manmade natural disaster in American history and at some point not have great art come from that,” Ferrara continued. “Maybe not immediately as you’re getting your life back together, but that trauma has to be processed in some way, and I think that one of the pillars of the resurgence of New Orleans’ art is, after the fact, in some way, processed through an artist’s DNA.”
Artists had grants to fall back on, but no such lifeline existed for galleries. Ferrara took his gallery program on the road for nearly a decade after the storm, focusing on fairs, taking the work of local artists to the world. Neighborhood galleries that had been open for years, connecting artists with collectors, were there one day and gone the next, never to reopen. But again, three years or so after the storm, as tourism started returning, as residents began putting their homes and lives back together again, New Orleanians started thinking about art, as they always do.
Then, Something Unexpected Happened
As expected, Katrina’s death and destruction resulted in a mass exodus of people out of New Orleans. Residents who first left NOLA for Houston and Nashville and Atlanta as refugees decided to stay gone. Go back for what? Rebuild with what money? Return to what job? The city’s population declined by more than 50 percent in the two years after the storm. It has yet to fully return to pre-Katrina levels. What could never have been expected was the mass influx of outsiders drawn to New Orleans in the years following by what they saw on TV. Largely young people, creative people, educated people. People interested in service and community. People who might have otherwise started their adult lives in New York or Chicago chose New Orleans.
People like Ferrara Showman Gallery partner and “This City Holds Us” curator, Matthew Weldon Showman. He moved to New Orleans after college in 2011 having only visited once before. “I am one of those people; I was in high school when Katrina took place, I was thinking about New Orleans through that,” Showman told Forbes.com. “I had traveled, post-Katrina, to visit the city, and it sunk its teeth into me. I graduated university and I just couldn't get something about the New Orleans’ arts community out of my mind.”
New Orleans does that to people. “The storm put a spotlight on the city, and people all over the country, the world, started to look to New Orleans and apply whatever their interests were to a way for them to support the city,” he continued. “If you were an art collector or involved in museums or an artist yourself, you were looking at New Orleans, this huge opportunity was created as a result of the storm.”
“More mature, more refined, and more opportunity, and it also comes with the recognition of outside people, be they collectors, curators, directors, whoever, we've got the recognition, we've earned that recognition through 20 years as not just some oasis, we're a part of the (broader) dialog,” Ferrara said. “New Orleans used to be this closed off world, this little island, parochial, and the borders were not porous. Now it's this back-and-forth communication between (New Orleans and) the outside world, there's no more borders. Artists don't have to move to New York to try and make it. They can stay here.” Those who have, through their talent and spirit and innovation and resilience, with help, have created something greater than they inherited.
“Something that I worked on over the last 20 years is for the visual arts to take its rightful place in New Orleans (culture). Food and music were always the two. Well now, it’s food, art, and music–a Holy Trinity,” Ferrara adds, referencing a popular term used to describe Cajun and Creole cooking’s three primary ingredients: onion, celery and green bell peppers. “We have taken our rightful place next to food and music.”
It gets no higher in New Orleans.