[CPProt.net] Katrina's cultural fallout. Hurricane leaves some of the South's most precious treasures struggling to reclaim their place.

[MSN CPPnet (Ton Cremers)]

Katrina's cultural fallout

Hurricane leaves some of the South's most precious treasures struggling to
reclaim their place

By AUDRA D.S. BURCH

aburch at herald.com


BILOXI, Miss. - During the longest and most dreadful days after Hurricane
Katrina, Robin Krohn-David scoured this city's Point Cadet neighborhood for
the insides of her beloved museum. She walked block after block through a
neighborhood nearly swallowed; pushed and kicked debris; sat on her knees
and dug with her hands to find bits of culture protected in pristine glass
cases just days before.

The storm made a mess of Krohn-David's Maritime & Seafood Museum, gutted
what was once a cathedral-like edifice that gracefully told the story of the
old town and the sea. It is a museum in a city Laura Bush applauded just 18
months ago as a giant in preserving its heritage.

And so just about every day, Krohn-David pursues her own hurricane
search-and-rescue mission. And she's finding stuff: sometimes blocks,
sometimes miles away; artifacts, often broken, perhaps salvageable. Replica
oyster schooners with minor bruises; the bow to a 30-foot cat boat; a rowing
skiff.

Of the 1,000 artifacts, Krohn-David has recovered 30 pieces, sometimes in
pieces. Still, she works to make the museum whole.

''I come here and look at what's left, and it just takes my breath away. We
were washed away. This museum was family to me,'' she says tearfully,
remembering her 17-year odyssey to assemble the collection. ``We have to
rebuild, because this is a part of our history. It's just too important to
let go.''

The greatest natural disaster in modern history, Katrina plundered the
South's culture -- its greatest export; in some ways its sole province.

Artworks lie destroyed or barely breathing under inches of toxic mud;
museums are broken, with those still standing serving ghost communities.
Historic mansions along the coast, elegant pillared summer homes for the New
Orleans elite, are twisted and unrecognizable. The region's supremely
singular musicians are spread around the country, and not all will return to
resume making magic in New Orleans or along the Gulf Coast. Other cultural
totems -- theaters, galleries, botanical gardens -- suffered in varying
degrees from the winds and water.

''What has been torn apart is the warp and weave of these cultures,'' says
Lawrence Reger, president of the Heritage Preservation, a nonprofit
organization helping to restore cultural institutions. ``The question is how
do we recover, and how do we interpret what was there and even what is no
longer there.''

The litany of loss includes Beauvoir, the 1854 home of Jefferson Davis,
where the front porches were sheared off; the Dantzler house, set to open as
a Mardi Gras museum; much of the lifework of Southern artist Walter
Anderson, drowned in a vault at the family's beachfront compound. The
Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra lost its landmark home, Orpheum Theatre;
Bay St. Louis' Little Theatre was erased from the landscape.

MIRACLES, TOO

Mercifully, other icons were relatively spared: In Biloxi, the $30 million,
Frank O. Gehry-designed Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art, due to open next year,
stood strong despite a drilling from a casino barge. The Dusti Bunge
Foundation, which houses Southern abstract expressionists' work, was
unscathed. The Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs, which holds a
large collection of the artist's work, is undamaged. In New Orleans,
cultural institutions built on higher ground fared fine: Preservation Hall;
the New Orleans Museum of Art; the Ogden Museum of Southern Art; the D-Day
museum.

But also lost is an infrastructure to support art communities. Important
things are running thin, including resources, tourism and appetite for art
amid all the misery.

Julian Brunt, director of the Dusti Bonge Foundation, was in East Biloxi the
other day, there to see the ragged coastlines where grand-dame mansions once
stood tall. The storm chewed through streets, made piles of buildings and
left dozens of steps to nowhere. The stirrings of loss and desperation is
palpable.

'We are facing a huge struggle, which is, `How do we support these cultural
places if and while they rebuild?' '' Brunt says.

`A HUGE BLOW'

``Museums are not like retail stores that can close and then reopen quickly.
What will happen to collections? What will happen when staff members leave
the area for other jobs? This is just a huge blow.''

But though deeply wounded, deeply scarred, the South will culturally heal
itself, reclaim its story and create anew. It must, culturalists say,
because these places are empty and quiet and naked without art, without
narrative.

The details of who will pay for it and how and when are being sorted out.
But experts say the loss, still an early figure, exceeds $82 million.

Preservationists and conservators from across the nation are working
urgently to preserve millions in cultural gems and to rebuild the artistic
communities in Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and Alabama, the lower crescent
of the South.

''We have to save this stuff. If we lose it, we lose our soul,'' says Gerri
Combs, executive director of the Southern Arts Federation, an Atlanta-based
regional group. ``The art is needed to rejuvenate the spirit.''

And to give people hope that some precious shred of yesterday can be
returned.

Almost as soon as the scope of the damage became clear, cultural groups
began sending in the troops to rescue fallen art. The Federal Emergency
Management Agency, working with the Heritage Emergency National Task Force,
is helping public institutions salvage waterlogged documents, sodden
furniture and mud-caked art. It also is helping residents with damaged
private collections. Collectively, this is cultural work of unprecedented
proportion.

CULTURAL HAVOC

''We all know Katrina is one of the greatest human tragedies in the nation's
history -- but it could also be the greatest cultural catastrophe America
has ever experienced,'' says Richard Moe, president of the National Trust
for Historic Preservation, which has launched a preservation campaign in
areas affected by the storms. ``Rebuilding is essential, but it must
acknowledge the historic character of one of the nation's most distinctive
regions.''

The Heritage Preservation's Reger, looking for progress amid the ruin, turns
to South Mississippi. The Harrison County Library System lost about 175,000
volumes, valued at $3.5 million, including first-edition William Faulkner
books. But what is remaining of the paper-based materials has been moved,
stored and frozen to thwart mold. Soon they will be thawed, meticulously
washed and dried.

Ninety miles away in New Orleans, the Notorial Archives, a repository of
historical documents, has already committed about $770,000 to save 6,000
bound volumes of more than two centuries of transactions -- colonial and
antebellum notary records in Orleans Parish that were submerged in three
feet of water in the basement, Reger said.

The help, bound by the power of art, is coming big and small. The Richmond
Ballet raised about $2,000 to help displaced artists. The Penland School of
the Arts in North Carolina opened its studios to artists needing space. And
in Tampa, a collection of artists auctioned off Carmen -- a bald and bruised
she-mannequin whose parts were dismembered, artistically reinterpreted with
paint, decoupage and makeup. Once all dolled up, Carmen was auctioned off
and about $7,500 was sent to help artists.

Help will eventually get to the people standing sentry over battered
buildings and to the artists themselves, some who have lost every tool they
had to make beautiful songs, art, sculptures, cuisine.

STILL GOT HIS HORN

Vincent Broussard, who has played the saxophone in New Orleans as long as he
can remember, was gigging in Sao Paolo, Brazil, when Katrina hit. On a
performance break, he heard his homeland was submerged. It took him six
weeks to finally make it home, to finally make it to his Tremaine
neighborhood to rescue his goods from a home sitting in two feet of flood
waters. ''I lost my studio equipment, my instruments, my books, my music,
but it's all good. I have my horn so at least I can play,'' Broussard says
on his way to his new home in Manhattan, where he now shares a one-bedroom
with a friend.

Broussard is part of a larger pilgrimage of nomad musicians who left the Big
Easy looking for a stage, a friendly ear and a few dollars. They went to
places that embrace good music: New York, Austin, Memphis, Los Angeles.

He would like to go back to New Orleans, but things have to be right.

''The city's culture comes from us, the musicians, but I have to be able to
go back to a place where I can make money,'' says Broussard, now on the road
touring with the Rebirth Brass Band. ``Eventually you have to go back. New
Orleans without music is a shell of a city.''

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