NEW YORK TIMES

Art Captures a City's Tumult and Renewal
By JERE LONGMAN
December 5, 2005

The robot in the median on Elysian Fields Avenue has a barbecue grill for a head, a microwave oven for a face and an adding machine keyboard for a chest.

''I can see the wit of a city reborn,'' said Murray Brown, a teacher, as he viewed the so-called trashbot, made from items found amid Hurricane Katrina's debris. ''Or it might be a corpse.''

The hurricane has inspired visual art everywhere here, be it on canvas, T-shirts, refrigerators or tattooed arms and legs. By turns whimsical, angry, despairing and hopeful, the art explores such themes as loss, impermanence and rebirth as it seeks to sculpture a kind of coherence from emotional and physical wreckage.

''New Orleans is rotting and tragically fresh,'' said Herbie Kearney, a painter and sculptor whose studio was destroyed. ''We have to come back and make art. If you don't have culture, the city will become Disneyland for condo people.''

On St. Claude Avenue in the Bywater section of the city, Jeffrey Holmes and Andrea Garland have created a memorial to the ravaged Lower Ninth Ward. They have driven wooden crosses into the median and spray-painted a metal cadaver transport case with the lament ''RIP Lower 9,'' which is also etched into the artists' arms with tattoos.

Mr. Holmes also created a street memorial featuring molded black Styrofoam heads placed on stakes and called ''Field of Silent Screams.'' It was meant as a tribute to black residents in the impoverished Lower Ninth Ward who cried out futilely for help. But, he said, National Guard troops dismantled the exhibit one night, a consequence risked by many artists who created their works in the street.

''One guy said, 'Some of my troops find it offensive, and it might be construed as racist,' '' Mr. Holmes said. ''I said, 'Excuse me, you don't know me, the dynamics of my neighborhood, the friends that I lost.' ''

Not all of their posthurricane work has been so brooding. After the storm, Ms. Garland draped an abandoned city bus with moldy fabric and spray-painted the message ''This is not a Christo.''

''Sometimes,'' she said, ''you just have to make people laugh.''

Jonathan Traviesa, a photographer, rode out the hurricane in Mid-City and then traveled around in an inner tube, documenting the rescue of people on a strip of land near Bayou St. John. Mr. Traviesa had the photographs printed on corrugated plastic and stuck into the ground on metal tines, a comment on the pastures of signs that have sprung up offering tree trimming, house gutting and other cleanup services.

In mid-November, the photographs were placed in the spots where they had been taken, providing a time-travel perspective that was poignant but also transitory. By late November, the photographs appeared to have been removed, as if they were just another bit of storm debris.

''I thought having the work in the environment communicated something peaceful and reverent in tribute to the people of the neighborhood,'' Mr. Traviesa said from New York. ''But I knew the photographs could get confiscated, stolen or blown over. It was meant to be a temporary gift.''

For relief workers and residents who want something more than a T-shirt proclaiming Hurricanes Katrina and Rita as ''Girls Gone Wild'' and ''Twisted Sisters,'' tattoos have become a popular, indelible reminder.

''I don't want to forget that storm,'' Bubba Welborn, a local construction worker, said as he had the swirling winds of Katrina and ''I survived'' tattooed onto his left calf. ''That's the thing that chased me out of my city.''

Andy Antippas, owner of Barrister's Gallery in Central City, said he was initially reluctant to show a hurricane exhibit, believing that art might be incapable of capturing the breadth of the storm's devastation.

Then Mr. Antippas reconsidered. A project called ''Dirt Drive,'' initiated by an artist named Adam Farrington, invites artists from around the country to send packets of dirt to be piled in a mound in a symbolic effort to repair the city's failed levees.

The project underscores a growing belief here that New Orleans is being forgotten by the federal government and will have to rebuild itself. Even residents of largely untouched Uptown neighborhoods seem to have grown insulated from more despoiled areas like Gentilly and the Lower Ninth Ward, Mr. Antippas said.

''They've got their cable and gas and electricity, and most of the trash is picked up,'' he said, ''and they're in a state of denial about the needs of the rest of the city.''

Defiantly, Mr. Antippas reopened his gallery on Oct. 1, even without electricity, and exhibited works by Sallie Ann Glassman, a painter and voodoo priestess. Ms. Glassman sold hurricane-inspired paintings of roiling skies. At her Bywater home, she is now working on a piece featuring bruised clouds and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Ms. Glassman said she felt a ''sacred duty'' to capture the tumult of the moment. ''I tend to paint the way I feel,'' she said, ''and I guess there are a lot of turbulent emotions and thoughts right now.''

At the Waiting Room Gallery in Bywater, Pati D'Amico has been drawn to the hands of Hurricane Katrina victims. Ms. D'Amico has painted a series of panels in which hands provide a sign language of desperation, reaching for help, falling limp in defeat.

Her husband, William Warren, has begun to sculpture with cement as he explores elements of permanence and rebuilding.

''In all this destruction,'' Mr. Warren said, ''cement remained.''

Hurricane Katrina has forced reassessment on several levels for New Orleans's artists, who have been left to re-evaluate their work and their viability in a city of escalating rents and scattered clients.

''People can't afford to buy art,'' said Miranda Lake, 36, a painter who lives Uptown. ''They have to put roofs on their houses.''

A general sense of doubt is the subject of Jose Torres Tama's performance-art piece ''The Cone of Uncertainty,'' in which he explores, among other subjects, the future of New Orleans. He worries that it may become an ''insidious Las Vegas'' or a sideshow tourist destination ''where we become the three-legged woman.''

Mr. Torres Tama's roommate, William Sabourin O'Reilly, 33, is seeking to expand his short film ''Old Orleans,'' in which he juxtaposes scenes of the city's cultural heritage with documentary footage of Hurricane Katrina and prestorm newspaper headlines on the city's rising crime rate and sinking hope for its public schools.

''It was not only Katrina that destroyed New Orleans,'' Mr. Sabourin O'Reilly said. ''There was a perpetual state of passivity and tolerance of a lot of bad things.''

In the weeks after the storm, discarded refrigerators became billboards of protest, regarding the possible move of the New Orleans Saints to San Antonio or Los Angeles, and the widely criticized response of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Now the tone seems to have changed. A refrigerator standing along Esplanade Avenue this week offered a mournful request: ''Please Come Home.''

For those who cannot yet return, the Ashé Cultural Arts Center in Central City will soon begin transporting a photography exhibit of African-American life to displaced residents in cities including Atlanta; Baton Rouge, La.; Houston; and Jackson, Miss.

The exhibit is called ''The Ties That Bind: Making Family New Orleans Style.'' Those who attend will be asked to write stories of memory and hope on cloth that will be transformed into another traveling exhibit.

''It's our way of letting them know we are not complete without them, that their faces and hellos and sassy phrases are missed,'' said Carol Bebelle, project director for Ashé.

Even New Orleans art indirectly related to Hurricane Katrina has developed a certain cachet.

Humidity turned Ms. Lake's Uptown studio into a ''dank sweatbox'' after the hurricane, buckling and fading her collage paintings done with pigmented beeswax. Improvising with a razor blade and a pancake griddle, and drying some works atop her car, she said she restored four paintings and sold three at the Affordable Art Fair in Manhattan in October.

''People were hooting and hollering; they were so amazed we put it together,'' Ms. Lake said. ''If we get the underdog vote, that's fine. I have to buy a lot of Sheetrock and do a lot of mold remediation.''

Photos: Andrea Garland and her husband, Jeffrey Holmes, memorialized the Lower Ninth Ward with art on a median and tattoos on their arms.; Herbie Kearney, whose art studio was destroyed in the hurricane, has nonetheless kept on, here fashioning debris into a fishing boat.; A ''trashbot'' made from debris left by Hurricane Katrina is among many works popping up in New Orleans. (Photographs by Erik S. Lesser for The New York Times)