The last grim image Jeffrey Cook remembers is the sight of a dog gnawing at a dead man's finger. "There was death all around me," said Cook, a New Orleans-born mixed-media artist.
Fortunately, since his house is on one of the highest points in New Orleans, it suffered little damage. So when most of his neighbors fled, Cook stayed on, not wanting to abandon his 83-year-old neighbor, who refused to leave her cat.
Surviving on water from a neighbor's pool, he spent his days making art from junk he picked up in the street and taking photographs of the destruction so that someday, he said, people will be able to experience Katrina through the eyes of an artist.
"We were the only two left on the block," Cook recalled. "It was like living in The Twilight Zone. Every day you learned new ways to adapt. Looters were selling batteries for US$10 apiece. It wasn't until I heard gunfire in the middle of the night and saw the light from a helicopter shine in my window that I knew it was time to leave. My dad, my brother, my sister, they all lost their homes."
Cook, who eventually made his way to Tyler, Texas, saw more of Katrina than most of New Orleans' small but passionate community of artists, who have scattered around the country, most either moving in with friends or staying in hotels.
Members of this close-knit group keep in touch, however, mostly by e-mail, which has proved more reliable than cell phones. And since they have not been allowed back into New Orleans, most have heard only rumors about the condition of their homes, their studios and their art.
"We're a strong, nurturing community," Willie Birch, a 66-year-old painter, said in a telephone interview from an apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which he kept when he moved back home to New Orleans in 1993 after winning a Guggenheim Fellowship. "We'll continue to survive."
But many artists' works may not have fared so well.
John Scott, a local sculptor who drove to Houston at 3:30am the day Katrina hit, thinks he has lost his house and his studio. "I have a two-story studio, but if there was 1.8m of water, who knows," he said.
A major retrospective of Scott's work at the New Orleans Museum of Art ended on July 10, and at least one-third of the 199 pieces in the show were at his studio at the time of the hurricane.
The rest, he said, were at the gallery of his dealer, Arthur Roger, which suf-fered no significant damage. Miraculously, neither did his eight public-art works that dot the city, including a large, kinetic steel piece on the river.
Many in the New Orleans art community are worried about ArtEgg Studios, a building on South Broad Street that houses art as well as artists' and conservators' studios. It is about a kilometer from the Superdome in an industrial section of the city.
Esther R. Dyer, who has owned ArtEgg Studios since 2001, said she learned last week that part of the roof had blown off. "The biggest problem is water coming in and soaking the artworks," Dyer said from her apartment in New York. Since she can't get into the building, she hasn't seen the damage firsthand and is relying on reports from a cabinetmaker and a technology manager who stayed on to guard the building after Katrina hit.
Arthur Roger, a New Orleans native, said the gallery that he has run there for 28 years was fine. But he said he was worried about vandalism. "Most of us feel that art is not a target for looting," he said. "But we all have big glass front windows."
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