Museum a grimy look at Katrina’s toxic aftermath
Artists re-create marks left by floodwater, mold
NEW ORLEANS — Patches of black mold on the ceiling. Water marks on the dingy walls. Toys, furniture and a baby grand piano tossed about and covered in a gray muck.
The busted floodwall behind the long-abandoned house in New Orleans’ Gentilly neighborhood was mended over a decade ago, but the house looks, again, as though head-high floodwaters had only just receded.
It’s just an illusion created by volunteers and theater artists who’ve turned two rooms in the house next to the London Avenue Canal into a life-sized diorama. It’s the city’s latest monument to the disaster that struck Aug. 29, 2005, when levees and floodwalls failed against the storm surge of Hurricane Katrina and 80 percent of New Orleans flooded.
A project of the donor-funded nonprofit group Levees.org, the Flooded House Museum is unique among the city’s monuments to Katrina’s destruction. There are markers at various sites, including some of the places where floodwalls gave way. But there’s nothing like this re-creation by artists Aaron Angelo and Ken Conner. They were tasked with depicting what homeowners would have found once they were allowed back into the area in the months after the storm hit, once the water had receded and roads were cleared of debris.
They used donated materials — furniture, art, household bric-a-brac — while drawing on research and memories as they painstakingly conjured a disaster scene, taking care to accurately depict how the watermarks formed on the walls as the putrid water dropped in stutter-step stages over the days and weeks following the storm.
“The water was not clean water,” Conner said one recent morning as he and Angelo rushed to complete the project, which will be formally unveiled Saturday. “It was salty water with a variety of contaminants. So each layer took on different looks.”
He was working around a piano that sat akimbo in the middle of the floor. Angelo had earlier re-created nature’s force by taking a sledgehammer to one of its legs.
This was a sort of Act II for the project. The rooms were unveiled in August as a portrayal of the way they might have looked Aug. 28, 2005 — art hanging neatly on freshly painted walls, toys on the throw rugs and a newspaper on the coffee table with an ominous headline: “KATRINA TAKES AIM.”
“Anytime you see devastation on a mass scale in world history, we always try to preserve one of the bad elements of it to illustrate to future generations what happened,” said Angelo, who not only donated effort but also some toys his 6-yearold daughter had outgrown. “And, so, this place, the more I’ve spent time with it, the more I realize how dynamic of a story it is.”
The finished product, which visitors will be able to view through the front windows of the house, will be a permanent installation. And it may be expanded to other parts of the house, which, now, is mostly gutted.