Hope on the Wall

Two decades after Hurricane Katrina, a new generation of New Orleans artists confronts its legacy, creating a tribute that blends memory, resilience and imagination

- by JANEÉ BOLDEN

For Brandan “BMike” Odums, the celebrated New Orleans-based visual artist and founder of Studio BE, it is also a moment of generational hand-off—a time to center the voices of youth who didn’t live through the storm but still carry its legacy in their bones.

This summer, Odums led a new cohort of students through his Eternal Seeds program, an annual art and mentorship initiative housed at Studio BE. The young artists, all born after the devastation of August 29, 2005, spent six weeks studying Katrina through oral history, documentary footage, poetry and community testimony. The culminating project: a striking new mural painted on a levee wall in the Lower Ninth Ward, the very ground zero where floodwaters surged when the levees broke.

The mural is not a memorial in the traditional sense; it is layered, living and fiercely imaginative—combining archival imagery, symbolic artifacts and original artwork by the students themselves.

“We framed this whole summer around three things: memorial, mythology and imagination,” Odums told Newsweek. “We knew how to approach creating a memorial for Katrina—researching, listening to people’s stories, honoring specific moments. But we also wanted the youth to take ownership of those stories. Mythology became about how they see themselves in the legacy. And imagination was about looking ahead—how do we want the future of New Orleans to look?”

That question found its answer not only on the wall, but in the process.

Hurricane Katrina killed more than 1,300 people and displaced over a million residents across Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. In New Orleans, levee failures left about 80 percent of the city underwater, with some areas, like the Lower Ninth Ward, submerged under 12 feet of floodwater.