Dispatch from New Orleans
Thu, 29 Sep 2005 23:09:03 -0700

Holmes before his arrest

By Gert Van Langendonck
A controversial public art exhibit is shut down, artist arrested

Over the past few weeks, artist Jeffrey Holmes (40) has become something of a fixture in the Bywater area of New Orleans’ 9th Ward. Holmes has the distinction of being the first artist to mount an exhibition in post-Katrina New Orleans. When he and his wife Andrea Garland (34) returned to their house on St. Claude Avenue, the first floor had been flooded by the probably toxic water form the nearby Industrial Canal. They decided to park all its contents, some of their artwork and debris as well, on the median of St. Claude Avenue, and calling the whole thing ” Toxic Art – this exhibition can kill you!”

St. Claude Ave. is a main thoroughfare, leading from the French Quarter to the twice-flooded Lower Ninth Ward. So Holmes’ open air art show had a steady stream of visitors: cops, contractors, relief workers, journalists. “Many people would wave, and some would stop. Nobody seemed to mind,” Holmes said. “The idea was that it would remain there until the garbage collectors got back to this part of the city, and everything would be taken away,” Holmes said last week.

What he didn’t expect was that he would have to go to jail for his art. On Monday night at 4 a.m., Holmes said, National Guard soldiers pulled up at the house. “I went out to talk to them, and one of them said that some people had taken offense at some of the art work, specifically a number of spikes with black heads on them.” After Holmes spent some time arguing with the soldiers about the First Amendment, the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) was called in, and Holmes was arrested for disturbing the peace and intoxication, although he said he hadn’t been drinking.

Holmes ended up in “New Angola South,” the makeshift jail at New Orleans’ Amtrak station, where more than four hundred people have been jailed since Katrina. He was released after five or six hours, and given a January court date, which he feels sure will be thrown out of court. But he is upset at the arbitrary character of his arrest. “It is all part of the corporate takeover of New Orleans, and this should be a warning to people everywhere in America. They can just come in and take the city over. They don’t want people to come back here. They want to have their hands free to raze the Lower Ninth Ward, and bring in the condos.”

During an earlier visit to “New Angola South,” where Holmes was jailed, more than a dozen people were sitting inside the Guantanamo-like fences that have been erected on one of the station’s platforms to make a makeshift jail. The facility gets its name from the Angola State Penitentiary, a former slave plantation northwest of Baton Rouge that houses some 5,000 inmates. After Katrina, it was Angola’s chief warden, Burl Cain, who got the job of evacuating some 6,000 inmates from the flooded prisons of New Orleans.

“Actually, we’re not supposed to call it ‘New Angola South’ anymore,” said Maj. Troy Poret, a warden from Angola State Penitentiary. “There have been some complaints. Officially, we are now Camp Amtrak.” Poret was part of the initial operation, which involved guarding the inmates on an Interstate overpass during the first days after Katrina hit. Now he is in charge of jailing people who are arrested by any of the dozens of law enforcement agencies, including the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team and the DEA, that have been roaming the streets of New Orleans for the past three weeks.

Among the arrestees were seven black teenagers from New Orleans East, who had been arrested the day before on looting charges. The all claimed to be innocent. “We had come back to get clothes from our houses and some of our friend’s houses,” said Allen ‘Taylor’ Tezon, 20. “We were changing a flat tire at a gas station when the NOPD showed up.” The gas station had previously been looted, and Taylor’s girlfriend, who was sharing the women’s pen with a friend, admitted that they had at one point gone inside to look for a soft drink. For the NOPD, it was enough reason to book all seven of them for looting, a felony charge.

“Yeah, I have 5,001 prisoners in Angola who all claim to be innocent,” Maj. Projet said dismissively, before spitting out his tobacco on the tracks. But he seemed sympathetic to the teenagers’ plight, and appeared to be making a call on their behalf.

The law enforcement community appears to be bracing itself for the return of the city’s citizens in the coming days and weeks. “Business is going to pick up pretty soon,” said one guard at the jail. And on Bourbon Street, where more and more bars have been opening up over the past few days, catering mostly to police and contractors, James McGee, a police psychologist and FBI negotiator from Maryland, warned us to be very careful. “This has always been a very dangerous city. And the cockroaches, they have never really left. They are about to come out again.”

GNN special correspondent Gert Van Langendonck is a freelance journalist based in New York City. The former foreign editor at the Brussels daily De Morgen, he covered wars in the former Yugoslavia, Congo, Rwanda, Burundi and Somalia. Most recently, he spent more than a year covering the insurgency in Iraq. His special report on PTSD and the murder of a U.S. soldier, War the Comes Home, ran on GNN in June.