You've heard of making lemonade from lemons, but making art from rubble? To see that, you have to go to the Gulf Coast.
As Katrina anniversary week begins here, the twin towns of Bay St. Louis and Waveland are hosting a mixture of memorial services and festivals to mark the occasion. The celebration side of things kicked off with a different kind of art show Sunday night. There were oil paintings, watercolors and music, but most compelling were pieces called "found objects/storm debris."
Solveig Wells found something she never thought she’d see again walking along the Bay St. Louis beach a few months ago. She and her husband were in their part-time New Brunswick, Canada, home last August when Katrina hit. Their Bay St. Louis home was destroyed, along with her valuable store of quilt swatches. By the time they returned, the quilt material that was in her pool house had been discarded by clearing crews, along with the rest of the rubble. She figured it was gone forever.
Then one day, walking along the beach, she spotted something that looked like a piece of paper sticking up out of the sand.
"I kicked it with my toe and it didn't give," she said. "It just stuck."
So she bent down and grabbed it and started pulling. Quickly, the pattern began to look familiar: It was a border fabric she had been keeping for a rainy day project. Hand over hand, she pulled and pulled, eventually yanking out 15 yards of the stuff. Nearby she found several other lumps of her old material. Perhaps it fell out of a dumpster or was somehow washed away before it could be discarded. However it got there, Wells says her lost quilting material somehow found its way back to her.
Now, she's turned the resurrected quilt scraps into display art that’s being shown in Canada and at the Bay St. Louis Library.
Photographer Cathy Waugh made art out of someone else's scraps -- the scraps of a grand piano. A volunteer from Kentucky who came to the hurricane zone to help with the cleanup, Waugh was working near the beach when she spotted a lonely, damaged piano, sadly tilted atop a pile of rubble.
Photographer Cathy Waugh stands by her image, "Blues by the Bay". (Robert Hood / MSNBC.com)
Musical debris
Perhaps the piano had helped entertain crowds of family and friends through the years. Or perhaps it was someone’s secret pleasure. Either way, it now was storm debris. The house it was in had collapsed around it, the structure reduced to a pile of matchsticks of lumber. Somehow, the piano largely withstood the storm. Its legs were shorn, some keys were broken, but the main structure, the strings, the hammers somehow survived.
Waugh knew she needed to preserve the moment. So she grabbed her camera and returned for several evenings after her volunteer work, waiting for just the right light. Three nights later, she snapped a picture she now calls "Blues by the Bay."
It shows the piano as the sole identifiable object in an otherwise mind-bending pile of rubble. Look hard and you can just about make out a tattered MRE (Meal Ready to Eat) packet in the foreground.
"I never knew debris could be so beautiful," a woman named Jan said as she walked by the picture.
Read previous story: Creating treasures from trash
A few days after the photograph was taken, as Waugh tells it, the Army Corp of Engineers debris clearing team came arrived in the area. Along with the broken glass, torn insulation and snapped support beams, their heavy equipment scooped up the tattered piano and took it to a garbage dump.
Nearly nine months later, Waugh was still in Bay St. Louis, still volunteering, when she set up a small art studio to sell her work. Not long after, she says, the woman who owned the piano spotted the picture in her studio and asked about its fate.
"I had to tell her they took it to the landfill," Waugh said. "It just broke my heart."
Broken hearts on display
There were plenty of broken hearts on display Sunday night at the art show in the brand new Bay St. Louis Chamber of Commerce building. A painting called "Blue Roofs" is a primary-color oil painting of the rows of FEMA tarps that covered hundreds of homes in the area. Other works with names like "Pier After Katrina" and "We Waited For Katrina" reveal the depth and range of emotions felt by people of the region one year after the storm hit.
Waugh said art can be an important tonic in the struggle for survival and revival facing Gulf Coast residents.
"It brings the feelings to the surface," she said. "They are there anyway, and you have to deal with (them). Art helps. ... It's cathartic."
The rest of this week also should be cathartic for the area. There's a jam-packed schedule of events, ranging from a tolling of all church bells on Tuesday morning -- the Katrina anniversary -- to a concert by the St. Rose Gospel Choir.
The piano, we’ve been told, will be fully operational and finely tuned.
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Yes, I recall during my childhood seeing art pieces made from bombing rubble--in Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Nurnberg, Dresden, Muenchen--of course, those were man-made catastrophes
a mercer seattle WA (Sent Aug 28, 2006 5:27:03 AM)
O.K. once again I have become confused. Did the piano go to the dump or is it fully operational?
andy,booneville ms. (Sent Aug 28, 2006 7:12:05 AM)
It is very important for those who lived thru the storm to document it this way, and not just the journalists who reported it and still report on it. Yes, it is cathartic for those who are suffering still. I hope we continue to see "art from rubble". It shows the healing has begun.
lg Merritt Island, Florida (Sent Aug 28, 2006 11:11:44 AM)
I'm confused along with Andy. What really happened to the piano?
Julie, GR, MI (Sent Aug 28, 2006 11:20:27 AM)
When they say the piano will be fully operational and finely tuned I believe they are speaking of the piano the choir will be having with them not the one that was taken in the photograph
Dave, NewportNews, Va (Sent Aug 28, 2006 11:30:47 AM)
To the owner of the piano: My daughter has a gorgeous picture of this piano, too. It's really beautiful and the rays of the sun are just filtered down through the leaves of an oak and the keys are glistening. I know it won't replace it, but if this was your piano, we'll email the pictures she took to you. I believe she took it near our old house on beach blvd....but not really sure. Please write me. I'd like to send it to you. Maybe we used to be neighbors.
Laurie (Koch) McLean (Sent Aug 28, 2006 6:07:06 PM)
I lived in New Orleans for 30 years.My children and 6 grandchildren are still there. I spent this day one year ago crying and driving-going from county to county in South Georgia collecting generators.I could not sleep for days, so I painted. And painted and painted. I could not sleep until I completed a large canvas. It is a fountain in a couryard being bathed in warm sunlight. I call it "Prayers for Katrina". It is amazing to see the reaction of people to it. I understand how art heals. Thank you to all of you along the Gulf Coast that are also finding comfort and sharing it with all of us. My prayers are with you.
Dorothy M. Bassett (Sent Aug 29, 2006 9:27:23 AM)
Terrific article and bravo to both of these women for their fine work. The rest of us feel so much empathy and while we were not there to suffer and struggle through Katrina and her aftermath, we are in pain along with you all. I am a bit happier knowing there's some beauty borne of this horror.
Ellouise Pennington, Fairfax, Virginia (Sent Aug 29, 2006 9:29:38 AM)
Attn: confused people
Read the line that says: "heavy equipment scooped up the tattered piano and took it to a garbage dump".
tory whitson (Sent Aug 29, 2006 11:18:51 AM)
I saw this piano in November. It was not tattered. It was quite beautiful by then. Maybe the rains had washed it clean, but of all the debris we climbed through, near our old house, it looked so amazingly untouched. All I can think of is that it escaped the collapse of the walls, the roof floated away and the piano did too, and then it settled down when the waters receded. My offer is still out there. Please write me if this was your piano. I'd really love to give a little of it back to you. It was so heartbreaking seeing it lying there in the grass and sand. I remember looking up and seeing the beach and the water was glistening, just like always. High tide. It was so comforting to feel the breeze and hear that lap lap lap of the waves and so bizarre to look back down again at something so beautiful and precious and so unbearably sad.
Laurie (Koch) McLean (Sent Aug 29, 2006 7:55:41 PM)
Arizona Musicfest in Carefree, Arizona is proud to have participated in raising funds to bring a new piano to St. Rose de Lima Catholic Church. Music is the highest form of praise, inspiration, comfort and joy that man can muster. We are happy that it is again part of life in Bay St. Louis. Best wishes from Arizona Musicfest.
Vickilyn Hussey on behalf of Arizona Musicfest, Carefree, Arizona (Sent Aug 29, 2006 10:10:36 PM)
I am a photographer wondering the streets of New Orleans East. I have for some time looked at urban surfaces and debris fields as momentary statements of our state of existance. "Are we doing well as a collective group?" "What things of value have become piles of junk?" "Where are these piles of junk to be collected and disposed of?" "Who in the group bares the burden of living by the dump?" The term used for this problem is "lulu."
If you took all the junk in New Orleans and piled up in a football field it would make a stack two miles high. Can't we stop buying so much junk and putting where it shouldn't be?
I continue taking photographs of these od combination of things forced into the roots of overturned trees. Can't we consider recontructing this coast for something other than just people?
Darryl L. Moody, Indianapolis, Indiana (Sent Aug 29, 2006 10:22:29 PM)
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