In the days and weeks after Katrina, I remember telling people that it would take a generation for New Orleans to rebuild. While the city’s recovery is ongoing, it’s miles ahead of where I ever thought it would be. The arts helped fuel that recovery, which is why I wanted to write this story about Press Street/Antenna, the organization that created the annual 24-hour Draw-A-Thon. Thanks to all who helped pull this story together.
Here’s the lede:
Around 6 a.m. on a late November Saturday in 2006, a sand-colored Humvee carrying two uniformed men pulled up to Susan Gisleson. She was collecting sticks and stones along the railroad tracks in an empty part of New Orleans.
The city was still dark and damaged more than a year after Hurricane Katrina. The soldiers, Gisleson remembers, were “sitting in their wrap-around shades with assault rifles on their laps. You can’t read their faces because their eyes are covered. And one says, ‘Hey. What are you doing?’”
Nothing nefarious, she assured them. Later that morning, Press Street, the arts non-profit she’d co-founded, was hosting an around-the-clock Draw-a-Thon. The free event encouraged residents to take a break from the frustrations of rebuilding — and make a different kind of mark on the city. While most people would simply draw, Gisleson was also facilitating a workshop involving natural materials.
The men exchanged a glance.
“One said to the other, ‘I like to draw.’ And then the other said, ‘Yeah? I used to draw in high school,’” she recalls.
Soon, both camo-clad men had markers in hand and were drawing on sheets of paper affixed to the walls of the nearby Green Project, an environmental non-profit that had offered the space for the event. One drew an eye. The other sketched a hand holding a flower. After so much chaos and devastation, that tiny, peaceful moment was “pure magic,” Gisleson says.
It was among the first inklings Gisleson had that New Orleans would fully recover from Katrina. And it was proof of something she’d suspected in those days after the flood waters receded: that art can mobilize a disaster-struck community, long after the FEMA trucks and celebrity charities have left town.
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