After Katrina’s deadly waters, therapists brought watercolors

A child living in a FEMA trailer camp in Baker, La., participates on Sept. 15, 2007, in an art therapy program designed to help children displaced by Hurricane Katrina with their emotions. A handful of pieces from the therapy program later went on display at the New Orleans Museum of Art. (Lori Waselchuk/The New York Times)

By MICHAELA TOWFIGHI

With Popsicle sticks and pipe cleaners, 10-year-old Justin Nicholson made grave markers for an extensive cardboard city that included a mayor’s office and a church.

Vivian Nicholson, his 14-year-old sister, drew swirls and painted rivers in shades of blue. It was all she could think about. Vivian and Justin had fled New Orleans with most of their family as Hurricane Katrina approached, but their mother had stayed behind and was now missing in a flooded city.

“My whole life was affected by water,” Vivian said 20 years later. “It was surreal.”

After Katrina made landfall on Aug. 29, 2005, killing nearly 1,400 people and devastating the birthplace of jazz, art therapists from across the country descended on Louisiana. Bearing crayons, paint and sheets of white paper, they hoped that children would begin to draw what was too difficult to say aloud.

“They couldn’t talk about it because it would retraumatize them,” said Karla Leopold, an art therapist who had traveled from California. “The fact that they can put something on paper and choose to tell you or not is safe.”

Their drawings of houses had recognizable doors and windows, but one of the most striking differences Leopold noticed was that the walls had been rendered as large triangles, not the square bases with pointed tops you would typically see in a kindergarten classroom.

The children who lived through Katrina were simply drawing roofs. The rest of the house was flooded in their minds.

Soon after, their depictions became long rectangles on wheels. The concept of a home had morphed into the trailers in Renaissance Village, the largest temporary trailer park that the Federal Emergency Management Agency built in Louisiana after the storm. For almost three years, nearly 600 mobile homes filled with evacuees lined a gravel pasture.

Shaniah Twohearts was 9 when her family spent hours in traffic escaping New Orleans, first landing in a shelter before settling into a trailer in Renaissance Village, north of Baton Rouge. She slept in a bunk bed with one brother while her parents shared a bed with another. In art therapy, she constructed her model home out of a cardboard box, with cutout pink hearts on the wall.

Twenty years later, Twohearts cannot remember whether a different art project, an all-red painting, was a nod to the pet her family left behind in New Orleans or a new one it got in Renaissance Village. But given the chance, she painted a girl with a long ponytail who stood under the sun next to her dog.

Sister Judith Brun, a nun from the Baton Rouge area, helped coordinate relief programs for families after Katrina. Charitable organizations descended on the trailer park to support those who had lost everything aside from what they carried away in garbage bags.

But children were often forgotten, Brun said: “These families went through trauma after trauma, and the children tell the story.”

Brun remembers one drawing with a house and a blue line that marked the rising water. Stick figures were holding blue rectangles out a window. There was a snake in the water. A helicopter hovered above.

It was a depiction of how a 15-year-old boy had escaped his New Orleans house during Katrina. His father had guided the family onto the roof and instructed his siblings to wave T-shirts to get the attention of rescue services.

A handful of pieces from the therapy program later went on display at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Brun and Leopold rented buses so the children could see their framed work hanging in a professional museum.

“That was beautiful,” Vivian Nicholson recalled. “I guess sometimes you never realize that you have such talent in you until something life altering happens.”

Nicholson, now 34, still chokes up when she thinks about New Orleans. She lived in Tremé, in a sixth-floor apartment. When she started her first day as a freshman at Sarah T. Reed High School, she was hoping to join the band.

There was no second day.

Instead, her family packed up a van and started driving west toward Baton Rouge, sitting in traffic for 20 hours. When they arrived at a family friend’s house and turned on the television, New Orleans was under water. Much of the city is below sea level, and some of the parish’s levees had broken.

Nicholson’s mother had chosen not to evacuate with the family, so while Nicholson was staying in Renaissance Village, she regularly checked the Red Cross logs of missing people, hoping to find her mother.

It took three months to learn her mother was alive. She had been airlifted off the roof of her house and temporarily slept inside New Orleans’ convention center before evacuating to Texas.

That harrowing experience has kept Nicholson from returning to her hometown. For the past few years, she has lived an hour’s drive away, in Gonzales, Louisiana.

“What if that happens again and it’s worse?” she said. “I have kids now, so it is just scary.”

The power of expressing yourself through art still rings true for Twohearts, now 29. During the coronavirus pandemic, when she was out of work and stuck at home, she turned to making digital images online. The surrealist pictures of skeletons and eyeballs rest on galactic backgrounds.

“I was called right back to art,” she said.

After Katrina, Twohearts and her family returned to New Orleans just in time for her to start high school. She has stayed close by ever since, now living just across Lake Pontchartrain in Slidell with her 6-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter.

Her memory of the hurricane is spotty. But she recalls that the art therapy program was something to look forward to and that it provided a new avenue of self-expression.

“We loved it,” Twohearts said. “And we just released as much as we could through it.”

The experience has also stuck with Leopold, the art therapist. After fires ravaged Los Angeles neighborhoods this year, she contacted her local Red Cross branch to help people who were displaced.

Shelters across the area were assembling recovery boxes. With her assistance, many of them included a simple set of art supplies so children could draw as they were resettled.

“Give them a piece of paper and a pencil; they’ll do what they need to do,” she said.