Re-Seed

Five years after Katrina, the New Orleans glass scene regroups in a city redefined.
by Andrew Page, URBAN GLASS

Walking into Gene Koss’s studio in Belle Chasse, Louisiana—a corrugated metal industrial building a half hour’s drive across the river from central New Orleans—the first thing you see is a sculpture model. The maquette is for a glass-and-steel monument to Hurricane Katrina, which for now exists only in miniature, set up in a triangular arrangement on the foyer floor. Koss designed it in the desolate months of late 2005, shortly after a catastrophic August hurricane partially submerged the Tulane University glass department in New Orleans, which he had spent nearly three decades building into a nationally known program. (His personal studio was on higher ground and suffered only minor damage).

A Midwesterner, Koss has spent his career using large-scale cast-glass-and-steel to explore the interplay of man, machine, and the land in weighty, monolithic feats of sculptural engineering. He calls the lot behind his studio, which is filled with rusting machinery he’s brought from as far away as Japan, his “library,” a place for research and inspiration. The flood was a colossal failure of this Southern city’s man-made levee system; a ferocious storm overwhelmed the human technology built to control the water. It was a moment of triumph for natural chaos over man-made order, with devastating consequences. For days, seas of water raged freely through the city that Koss has called home since 1976. The disaster changed him in ways that are perhaps best expressed wordlessly in this work—three lengths of rusty steel breached by a thin layer of cast glass. Though less than a foot tall, the maquette has an undeniable power, even at a small scale. In its distillation and emotional reticence, it is a more eloquent description of the traumatic event than the cheaply printed photo books of the destruction that are now sold beside Cajun recipe books at every souvenir shop in New Orleans.

A CITY STRUGGLES

Even as tourists flock back to Bourbon Street and are greeted with brave smiles, there’s no denying that five years later, this is still a chastened city. Eddie Bernard, who grew up across Lake Pontchartrain and set up his glass-studio-equipment business, Wet Dog Glass, in the Mid-City section of New Orleans in the years before the storm, saw years of investment washed away with Katrina’s receding floodwaters. His facility was severely damaged and much of his equipment ruined. In retreat, the water left an eerie mark of exactly how much of the area is below sea level. “When Katrina hit, it drew a level line all over the city that showed where it’s dangerous, where you’re going to pay $15,000 a year in insurance just to be there,” Bernard says.

The shock for residents was discovering that this demarcation was emblazoned across 80 percent of their city. Flood insurance has become astronomically expensive, if one can purchase it at all. Between the high insurance rates, the skyrocketing prices for any property on higher ground, and the slow return of evacuees, life post-Katrina has been a new and uncertain chapter in New Orleans’s nearly 300-year-old history.

August 2010 will mark the five-year anniversary of Katrina. To out-of-town visitors. New Orleans seems undaunted in its giddy, good-time celebration of music and food. Yet anyone looking closely will pick up an occasional note of restraint, an uncharacteristic melancholy that tinges music performances and conversations with residents, who are keenly aware of the impermanence of it all. This feeling became even stronger after the mandatory evacuation during Hurricane Gustav in 2008. Though the city was spared another flood, Gustav reminded anyone who might have tried to forget Katrina that another disaster is very possible. Some didn’t need the reminder. After much soul-searching, Bernard decided to relocate his business to rural North Carolina, where real estate prices are lower, property insurance is affordable, and hurricane evacuations are rare. Wet Dog Glass reopened for business 750 miles away from New Orleans in the spring of 2008. Bernard had seen enough after three years of cleaning up and rebuilding.

RESOLVE TO REBUILD

Those who have stayed put in New Orleans have had to navigate a chaotic and confusing bureaucracy during the recovery. Some artists lost their work or their tools when landlords repaired their damaged buildings and indiscriminately threw out tenants’ possessions. Many New Orleans residents chose not to return at all. The city’s population plummeted from more than 450,000 to, according to some 2009 estimates, about 300,000. (More recent numbers show a slow but steady population increase, driven in part by the ongoing rebuilding of New Orleans, which has generated jobs and insulated the local economy from the national recession.)

When the city’s glass-studio directors returned and began assess the damage, what they found depended on their location. Jeannie Blair of New Orleans Glassworks, who was allowed to return just a week after the storm because she and her husband own farm animals, found her facility, in the gallery district of downtown New Orleans, relatively unscathed. Glassworks, which focuses on architectural commissions, classes, and gallery sales to walk-in tourist traffic, sits on high ground near the central business district and suffered only minor wind damage. “It was spooky,” says Blair. “Because the city itself could not get back in motion, you did what you could. Anything you relied on was hit-or-miss.”

Mitchell Gaudet, founder of Studio Inferno in the Bywater neighborhood, was not so lucky. He was at Pilchuck when the storm hit. Having grown up in New Orleans and a veteran of hurricanes, he wasn’t too worried, despite all the dire warnings in the news. But he quickly realized something was different as he monitored the situation on the Internet. “The strangest thing was I could see Studio Inferno’s building after the storm on Google Maps,” he said. “It was like my facade had collapsed in on itself, and the roof had peeled back. It was like a big expensive sardine can.”

Gaudet returned early, thanks to an old military ID he still had from his days in the Army Reserves, and he quickly set about cleaning up the mess and rebuilding the studio he and Scott Benefield built up in 1991 after they left Glassworks in an acrimonious parting with Jeannie Blair. As difficult as it was to clean up after Katrina, Gaudet saw that the disaster held opportunity. As most of his staff did not return, he decided to reinvent his business, transforming it from a production-casting facility selling design lines at craft fairs to a smaller operation that gave him more time to focus on his own artwork. Gaudet says that in some ways the disaster was as energizing as it was traumatic, a way to remake what had been. “New Orleans has always been a funky place,” he says. “Katrina made it a little funkier.”

REIGNITING THE FIRE

Within three months, Mark Rosenbaum of Rose Tree Glass had relit his furnaces and was back in business filling the wholesale orders he ships out to galleries and retail shops around the country. Artists Sibylle Peretti and Stephen Paul Day were not allowed to return right away, like many tenants, and they lost artwork when their rental property was cleaned out by an overzealous landlord. But they have returned to their city and have re-established their successful individual art practices.

Katrina was especially daunting for the glass artists in the city because it came hard on the heels of a major success. In 2004, almost exactly one year before the hurricane, the Glass Art Society held its annual international conference in New Orleans. It was a moment of recognition and affirmation for the city’s glass artists and its growing number of public and private studios. The GAS conference had been in New Orleans once before—in 1985, when the recently expanded Tulane glass department was the focal point of the conference. The second GAS conference took place two decades later, with events spread out across the city, amid a burgeoning glass scene. There was New Orleans Glassworks, in the central warehouse district since 1990 (though not a single official GAS conference event took place there because of “scheduling conflicts,” according to Blair). Studio Inferno opened in the Bywater neighborhood in 1991, Rose Tree Glass opened in Algiers Point in 1993, and Conti Glass opened adjacent to Wet Dog Glass in 2002 in Mid-City. Some of these studios were private, some open-access; some focused mostly on decorative work, others on sculptural projects, but former students and associates of Gene Koss at Tulane started them all.

Gene Koss is a powerfully built man who earned his B.F.A. with Doug Johnson at the University of Wisconsin in River Falls, and his M.F.A. with Jon Clark at the Tyler College of Art in Philadelphia. He moved to New Orleans in 1976 and set about expanding Tulane’s small glass department with his energetic advocacy.

“Peter Voulkos came in and did a big workshop,” remembers Koss of his early years at Tulane. “He said, ‘You have the students behind you and a gas line. You should go for it.'”

With the support of the glass and ceramics sculptor Robert Wilson and his second wife, Margaret Bosshardt Pace, an arts advocate, Koss began to get substantial outside funding to expand the glass department in the early 1980s. In addition to a growing number of B.F.A. students signing on to study glass, he took on M.F.A. students. His first M.F.A. student was Rosenbaum, who would go on to establish a successful production business at Rose Tree. Rosenbaum partnered for a time with a New Orleans glass pioneer named Arden Stewart, who had been blowing glass long before Gene Koss came to town and selling her work out of a gallery space connected to her studio.

RUGGED INDIVIDUALISM

What distinguishes the New Orleans glass scene from others is its surprising diversity, a sharp contrast from Seattle, for example, where the Venetian style of glassblowing predominates due to the singular influence of Dale Chihuly. Despite the fact that nearly all of the city’s studio directors and artists have spent time at Koss’s Tulane program, there is little that unifies the pursuit of glass in New Orleans. Each facility is dedicated to a different technique or aesthetic, whether it’s Rose Tree, where Rosenbaum creates the decorative designs that line the shelves in his showroom, or Studio Inferno, where glass castings of water-meter plates help fund the personal studio of Gaudet. Meanwhile, Glassworks in central New Orleans is now run solely by Blair, who studied in Tulane’s glass department before a short-lived partnership with Gaudet and Benefield. Glassworks focuses on architectural commissions and gallery sales of the work of the facility’s glass instructors. Tulane graduate Carlos Zervigon shows his utterly unique, organic tubular abstractions at a major New Orleans gallery. Even Bernard of Wet Dog Glass, who went to Rochester Institute of Technology for his B.F.A. rather than Tulane, was later hired by Koss to work at the Tulane studio for a time.

Like many successful artists, Koss has an unwavering focus on realizing his own artistic vision. In his forceful, single-minded pursuit of sculptural expression, he casts glass on a scale that presents daunting logistical challenges to create and ship. To watch Koss struggle to finance, cast, and transport his monumental works is a crash course in the need for an artist to be self-reliant, determined, and uncompromising- characteristics that all glass artists and studio directors in New Orleans seem to share.

As a professor, Koss pushes his students to become problem-solvers themselves, and makes no apologies about not holding hands or spoon-feeding technique. His style may not have worked for all students, particularly those interested in focusing on traditional glassblowing, but it seems to have bred a fierce self-reliance in those who stayed after graduating. It also appears to have allowed the glass studios of the city, and its artists, to recover after the devastation of Katrina and rebuild in the face of serious adversity.

STARTING OVER

After Katrina, Koss chose to reset the Tulane cold shop with new equipment rather than repair and rebuild what had been damaged by the floodwaters. Like the Tulane glass department, the larger New Orleans glass scene has also cleaned house and come back stronger. In the five years since Katrina, Rose Tree has steadily increased its orders around the United States, and the gallery and working studio have more walk-ins.

Studio Inferno is up and running, with the second-floor hot shop now owned by blower and hot-worker James Vella of Vella Vetro. Andy Brott, a longtime employee of Glassworks, has rebuilt his personal studio in the Uptown section of New Orleans, which had been blown off its foundation by the storm. His new hurricane-proof building is a concrete-walled, four-story live-work studio called Brottworks, where Brott will focus on his growing architectural commissions for lighting, kiln-formed panels, and woven glass sculptures. Laurel Porcari, a successful architect who moved to New Orleans to study at Tulane’s M.F.A. glass program to launch a second career, zeroed in on glass kiln-formed sculpture after taking a summer Pilchuck workshop with Warren Langley; she has a thriving architectural glass business. Her state-of-the-art kiln-forming studio on Magazine Street allows her to create commissions for private and public clients such as the Children’s Hospital of New Orleans, where her panels are a soothing presence in the critical-care waiting room.

But there is no better symbol of the rebirth of the New Orleans glass scene than the New Orleans Creative Glass Institute. Occupying the space vacated by Wet Dog Glass and its open-access facility, Conti Glass, the New Orleans Creative Glass Institute was formed with grants from the Ford Foundation and seven smaller arts-funding organizations. Porcari is on the board of NOCGI, as are Koss and Bernard. The driving force behind the organization is Carlos Zervigon, who serves as NOCGI’s president and CEO. In addition to his career as a glass sculptor, Zervigon is a community-minded lifetime resident of New Orleans. He saw early on the urgent need to preserve the glass scene at a time when many artists were deciding whether or not to stay in New Orleans.

NOCGI opened in September 2006, almost exactly a year after the hurricane. As glass artists regrouped in the wake of Katrina, it was a place where studio space could be rented at an affordable price before they rebuilt their own studios. Says Zervigon: “We knew we had to do something to prevent a total loss of the vibrant community of glass artists.” Given the strong egos of New Orleans glass-studio directors, NOCGI is also a place where the personal politics that have at times balkanized the glass scene are not in effect. Much like Conti Glass, the focus at NOCGI is on an open-access facility serving artists and students. The emphasis is on making art from glass, whether if one is affiliated with Tulane, Glassworks, or Studio Inferno.

In late 2009, NOCGI was awarded an Arts Economic Recovery grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, and the organization’s head, Rocco Landesman, made a personal visit to the glass center during his first official trip as NEA chairman. Part of the mission statement of NOCGI is “to promote and nurture the culture of New Orleans’ contemporary glass community.” The organization’s founding members can be proud of having helped to keep the furnaces lit through a difficult period—and of their progress in the five years since Katrina.