In the Wake of Devastation, Images of Hope

Living a thousand miles from home, camping out in her sister's basement in Ellicott City, Jane Hill spends a lot of time thinking about shelter.

Displaced by Katrina, she's a sculptor, a teacher and from her temporary home in Howard County, she now creates simple images of houses she calls the Safe House Series. There's a house raised up by twigs she gathered in the back yard. A house buffered from the elements by plastic bubble paper. A house that floats.

These are images of security and sanctuary, but also of fragile materials and fleeting time. The houses, like Jane Hill, are here for the moment -- and then, well, it's not clear. "The bottom line," Hill says, "is that all of these devices will fail. Are we ever really protected?"

Starting tonight, Hill's houses, and Thomas Drymon's abstract paintings, called "Cleanse" and "Purify," and Ryan Ballard's "Migration" -- decorated birdhouses dedicated to those who fed and housed him during his evacuation from Katrina -- and more than 40 other artists' works inspired by the hurricane will be on view and for sale at the Warehouse gallery in the District. The benefit show, Arty Gras -- the creation of Beth Baldwin, a Washington artist who works as a props maker for the Shakespeare Theatre -- is designed to raise money both to rebuild housing in Louisiana and to help artists devastated by the storm.

Hill, 38, is teaching drawing at Howard Community College, but her former students back in Louisiana are drifting home to Slidell, and Hill wonders whether she should be getting back to a place that is still home and yet isn't the home it once was.

Born in Washington, Hill grew up in Baltimore and had lived in Louisiana for 14 years before four feet of water flooded her house, destroying nearly all of the artwork she had created since her college years. She found her sculptures caked in mold, her clothing ruined, her furniture gone.

But the larger loss, she says, is the "total sense of emotional displacement. The history of my professional life was wiped out. I'm very lucky. I'm alive, I'm teaching, I had a family in Virginia and Maryland who I could go to. But every day I'm here, I wonder: Have I abandoned this place I love?"

Overcome by longing and indecision, she falls silent, stifles sobs. Only the subject of the Arty Gras show, which opens on the night of her home town's big celebration, allows Hill to speak again: "I'm so grateful there'll be something to do on Mardi Gras."

Some New Orleans artists are coming north for the show; others have shipped their work to Baldwin, who has spent the past two weeks arranging the pieces in the Warehouse gallery and coffeehouse across from the Washington Convention Center.

"I was on Craigslist in September, and I saw that a gallery in Chicago was offering to hang the show of any New Orleans artists whose shows were canceled because of the hurricane," Baldwin says. "I don't make a lot of money, so I can't donate a lot, but I can make things happen. So I contacted them and said, 'How about I do that in D.C.?' "

Paul Ruppert donated space at the Warehouse, and Baldwin set about inviting artists, dozens of whom leapt at the chance to show their responses to Katrina and start making a living again. "For a lot of artists, the need to be shown is just as important as running water," Baldwin says.

What the package delivery man brings each day is art that is neither dark nor angry, but in a striking number of cases explores ideas of home. There's a lot of water imagery too. Arks and isolation, rejuvenation and gratitude.

The storm took the roof of his New Orleans gallery, and the water took Thomas Drymon's work, a hundred paintings and photographs, the contents of his studio, the product of years of labor and inspiration.

Now, after Katrina, Drymon's work is different: "Before, I was very violent with my canvasses, but now I'm being very precise and careful. I'm using smaller brushes. I'm trying to express violent emotions but in a peaceful way, because all around me is chaos."

Drymon, who lived in Washington for 12 years before settling in New Orleans, was evacuated from his house when Katrina hit. He returned in October to a life dominated by the logistics of rebuilding. "My gallery was lost, so I didn't have that outlet for my work," Drymon says. "It was really hard to get started again, because what's the point? I've lost everything."

Yet the more he spoke to people beyond the storm area, the more Drymon and others in Louisiana came to see a need to grab hold of those of us who tuned in to the Katrina news coverage and then moved on.

"It seems like we've been forgotten," he says. "The attitude is, 'Aren't you over that yet?' They don't get that half the city still doesn't have power, that we only have three grocery stores open, that you really have to commit to one thing each day: Today the grocery store, tomorrow the post office, because the lines are so long and everything's so difficult. It's up to us as artists to make sure these stories are told, that we're still down here and we're not going to let anyone forget us."

Arty Gras runs from today through March 19 at the Warehouse gallery and coffeehouse, 1017-21 Seventh St. NW, 202-783-3933.

E-mail:marcfisher@washpost.com