How To Hold On To A Hurricane

It is late November and another hurricane season is drawing to a close, one that saw widespread damage caused by Hurricanes Helene and Milton among others. Each season runs from June through November, and during that time photographs of unimaginable devastation circulate swiftly by the media, permeating visual culture when storms are remarkably destructive. While these images spread awareness, garner support for relief efforts, and raise alarm for the climate crisis, they can be traumatizing for survivors. And they fall short in conveying how it feels to live through a hurricane. As a response to the saturation of these images, artists in the wake of these major storms create works to reflect human experiences and to de-sensationalize traumatizing imagery, for instance a 2015 exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art that commemorated the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina with no disaster imagery at all, based in part on concerns about how the images could trigger residents already affected by PTSD. 

In what follows, we convene works by artists from, and with deep interest in, New Orleans, Louisiana, and San Juan, Puerto Rico—artistic hubs of their respective regions that have experienced devastating hurricanes: Katrina in 2005 and María in 2017. New Orleanians and Puerto Ricans are linked not only by their shared histories of hurricanes that have altered the terrain of time and life, but also by governmental neglect, mismanagement of recovery efforts, and the U.S. militarizing both places after storms. We hold them in conversation, because “Caribbean culture extends to New Orleans. When people in Puerto Rico saw the botched response to Katrina, they knew the response to María and other disasters would be the same. They understood that the government neglects Black and Brown people.”¹ Bringing artists across these landscapes into conversation allows for a more nuanced understanding of how hurricanes affect individual people, ultimately resisting a narrative of destruction to unnamed masses.

The artists considered here convey the sensations experienced while riding out storms on the ground and observing their home communities from afar. These nuanced alternatives to disaster imagery are connected by shared values: (1) committing to sustained practice, (2) maintaining local perspectives and focus on their communities, (3) resisting an extractive approach, (4) highlighting the agency of the individuals represented in their work, (5) providing  nuanced understandings of these experiences, and (6) exploring sensation resulting from what has happened. In doing so, they render the unimaginable imaginable, the unknowable knowable, the unbelievable believable, holding onto these experiences for collective human consciousness. We move chronologically through the sensations commonly experienced over the course of a hurricane, from its initial sighting in the Atlantic until it breaks apart, leaving people to process what they have experienced: anticipating, hearing, bearing witness, and mediating memory.

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Sensation: Anticipating

As Hurricane María inched towards Puerto Rico just two weeks after Hurricane Irma, which left thousands without electricity or running water after catastrophic impacts in Barbuda, anxious anticipation took hold of Puerto Ricans both in the archipelago and the diaspora. Since 1960, satellite images have become a primary visual tool allowing people to anticipate the power and locations of major storms, and thus how to prepare. When a hurricane develops in the Atlantic, meteorologists begin determining its potential path, which evolves as it moves toward the Caribbean and Southeastern United States. Unlike with tornadoes and other weather events that occur more spontaneously, this technology provides people with days to anticipate and prepare for the event itself, although access to the data is unevenly distributed according to socioeconomic status. A perceived choice of whether or not to evacuate is often a myth perpetuated by privilege, with personal agency shaped by the resources people can or cannot access.²

Frances Gallardo relocated from San Juan to New York in 2009 and tracked María closely from afar. As a response to the physical isolation and disconnection she felt from her family in the midst of María, her practice turned inward and toward the laptop screen that offered new connections to home, including posts commenting on the weather from the archipelago. From a distance, an emotional bond continued with those back home rooted in care and concern for Puerto Ricans, family, and friends. Gallardo was troubled by the national news coverage when major storms occurred, observing a militaristic rhetoric and an aesthetic that solely conveyed doom: “It is tough, of course, but there is a whole culture of going through these phenomena and there is a lot of knowledge that we have about how to deal with them: when you need to gather water, when you need to leave your home, and everyone is calm. There can be a sense of peace as well when the lights go off in your home and you don’t have the interruption of the TV or other electronics. We become more attuned to the sounds of the wind and our surroundings.”³ A survivor of many hurricanes herself prior to her move, Gallardo remembers intimate moments of interpersonal communication and care among her family while hunkering down—moments that are not reflected in the dominant media coverage of these events, which often robs survivors of control over their representation. 

Gallardo began creating portraits of hurricanes as individual events with their own personalities, emphasizing how it felt to see the projected trajectories while anticipating the storm’s arrival. For example, in Gabino, she overlaid a sixteenth century map of the Caribbean with translucent lace-paper to reference how hurricanes connect families intergenerationally. On her use of lace-paper, Gallardo reflects, “I thought that the lace patterns spoke to entanglements, like the wind … all of those gusts of wind going through vegetation, through vernacular ornamental fences, like the ones around my parents’ neighborhood.”⁴ Gabino also references maps that visualize a long and relentless history of hurricanes crossing the Atlantic, like the one below that tracks all Atlantic hurricanes from 1851 to 2019; the lines obscure the region, not unlike the lace covering Gallardo’s fabric map. In Marla, viewers are granted the opportunity to view the Caribbean from above, spiraling storms layering upon one another. 

What does it feel like to inhabit a space whose history is obscured relentlessly by storm? When we consider the unending sequence of disasters in certain spaces “continuous disaster,”  we also assert that the term “recovery” must be pluralized, rendered “recoveries,” when disasters are unrelenting and overlapping: hurricanes, earthquakes, climate change, colonialism, and disaster capitalism are all interrelated.  

In a sustained practice since 2009, Gallardo has evoked the feeling of anticipating each storm in Puerto Rico and as a member of its diaspora. She renders a more intense system, like Hurricane Gabriel, boldly in bright red with the paper twisting into a three-dimensional spiral; Cynthia evokes more calm, less danger, in cooler tones and a flat surface. In her next delve into the archives of satellite imaging, Gallardo focused on storms that went unnamed.⁵ She used different colors and patterns of embroidery to trace their paths to delineate each one as unique, explaining, “Every hurricane has a different dance, a different rhythm.”⁶ Gallardo points toward the complexities of each storm and urges viewers to see the subtleties of how each one is experienced differently by individual people.

Gallardo poignantly recognizes that the knowledge of how to handle hurricanes was deployed as a decolonial strategy among Indigenous people of the Caribbean because they had the cultural memory, skills, and strategies to survive the storms, while the European colonizers did not. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy crossed the Caribbean, skirted up the East Coast and made landfall in New York and New Jersey, where Gallardo lived. With all of her hurricane knowledge, she understood that the damage and flooding would be significant and let her neighbors know it was time to prepare and what steps to take. They ignored her.  

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Sensation: Hearing

On the ground in San Juan, noise composer José Iván Lebrón Moreira watched María’s path and prepared a backpack of essentials, including sound equipment to record the storm. He reflects on its sound, “It was like listening to a ghost or a specter, surrounding your house; wanting to eat you.”⁷ Earlier that September, he attempted to record the sounds of Hurricane Irma, but because the electricity was out he was only able to record a forty-five minute continuous segment before his equipment shut down. Having learned from this experience, during María he recorded five to ten minutes every forty minutes, allowing listeners to experience what he calls a “disaster in crescendo.” For him, the sounds are both “fascinating” and “terrifying.” While post-María the project stalled due to the extensive electrical outages and his need to work, it eventually culminated in an album of sonic experimentations, Isla Eterna, which he released as José Ciénaga. In the electronic composition tracks, he mixes the original samples of wind, rain, and crashing debris with guitar and synth. One track entitled “9:20” is entirely devoted to the wind—unimaginably strong and sustained, accompanied by rattling noises along with voices from inside the space where he takes shelter. He now considers the album a memory of a critical moment. 

Residing in both the U.S. and Puerto Rico, Sofia Córdova was in Arizona when María impacted her home and family. In her video dawn_chorus ii: el niagara en bicicleta, Córdova includes footage captured by her aunt Maggie during the first hours of the storm. With the electricity out, inside a dark room, she documents the experience with only a flashlight. Narrating in Spanish, she says, “So we are in the thick of it.” The viewer can only see blackness, some movement, and captions in English on the bottom of the screen. She goes on, “Water splashes through the dining room windows,” while we hear water entering the room. Shining her flashlight onto the shuttered window she says, “Look how the water runs down. Like Aguadilla’s waterfalls.” The scene ends with the woman saying, “We’ll keep you informed. Bye!” She does not sound terrified but slightly in awe, “in the thick of” this uncanny experience. 

When Frances Gallardo experienced her first hurricane at the age of five, she heard the wind blowing through the buildings of Old San Juan, remembering that the city sounded like a bagpipe. To convey this sonic experience, Gallardo created Hurricane Soundscape. Kinetically, she connects the hurricanes to LPs spinning on a record player, the hurricane sound to that of saws, with brightly colored spiral shapes splicing loudly through the wooden table. Gallardo references a nineteenth century musical device, an Ariston organette, that plays music by pushing wind through holes on spinning disks of perforated paper; when she encountered one, she was shocked by how closely it resembled the paper hurricanes she’d been cutting. In collaboration with Jeffrey Concepción in Puerto Rico, she recreated the organette but used light instead of air to generate six distinct eerie sounds. It is discombobulating and reminiscent of what it feels like to have no idea what’s going on outside. 

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Sensation: Bearing witness

Hurricane María crossed Puerto Rico as a Category 5 hurricane and is regarded as one of the most catastrophic storms in the Caribbean in a century, but the death toll itself is disputed.  The government initially downplayed the numbers and reported only 64 deaths, while later reports identified 4,645 or up to 12,000. Much of the archipelago was without electricity for months, and the recovery was mismanaged by the local and federal government under the purview of then-President Trump. It fell to survivors—including artists—to survey and bear witness to María’s aftermath.

Ivelisse Jimenez had always been interested in fragments, dismantling old works she had created and combining them to make something new. In María’s wake, this practice became more important as she processed what she experienced through and after the storm. As she told us in an e-mail interview, twenty years of fragments became “an expression of what was happening: reuniting, recombining, recomposing things.” This new work, post-María, culminated in a series which was inspired by the “marks of water” on the remnants of her space.⁸ She developed a technique to highlight these marks by sealing liquid paint within layers of transparent vinyl. In a related work, she installed the seemingly countless, multi-colored strips of vinyl in a space where viewers can fully immerse themselves; indeed, Jimenez’s objectives are to “produce an experience, to raise awareness of the process by which we give meaning to an experience,” and in this case she conveys the sensations she experienced in María’s aftermath: seeing the space in disarray and attempting to make sense and create order through processes of fragmentation, reconstruction, reorganization. 

While recovery efforts stalled and living conditions worsened, opportunities to leave Puerto Rico were impeded in multiple ways, including extensive damage to the flight control towers and airline price gouging. As an artist who renders Puerto Rico in contrasts—beautiful and chaotic, industrial and natural—Gamaliel Rodriguez was well suited to draw the damaged flight control towers, imagining a dystopic future in which they burst with tropical foliage. He expressed to us in an e-mail that Puerto Rico’s isolation was exacerbated by Hurricane María, “The two doors for us were air or sea. Both were destroyed by the phenomenon. We were treated as second class U.S. citizens.” Just as opportunities to depart by plane were cut off, so, too, were supplies and food coming to the archipelago by sea, further exacerbating the Jones Act, which severely limits the ways goods can enter the territory. Rodriguez considers the cargo ship a “vital lifeline for our sustainability, since it brings almost all the food that we consume and other materials like hardware, wood, etc. We only produce 11% of our own food here so there is an element of dependency on these cargo ships.” Rendered bleakly with acrylic and ink on paper, Rodriguez’s image of a cargo ship in an empty harbor reinforces the sense of isolation after María in apocalyptic tones.

The colonial legacy of the United States also shaped the response to Hurricane Katrina, during which the areas most vulnerablized and neglected were predominantly African American communities like the Lower Ninth Ward. As Cedric Johnson put it in his 2013 book Neoliberal Deluge, Katrina’s destruction was the result of late capitalism, neoliberalism, and pro-market oriented reform policies, what Johnson defines as “a new order of market rule.”⁹ When Katrina crossed over Florida and struck the Gulf Coast in 2005, the world was inundated with images of flooded neighborhoods and people stranded on top of cars, buildings, and in the Superdome. The Mississippi Gulf Outlet, a channel constructed to support the growing shipping industry, took the place of the wetlands that protected the city; the channel funneled the water from a massive storm surge straight into the city rather than dissipating the water as the wetlands would have done. The Army Corps of Engineers acknowledged that the levees would not protect the city from storms higher than Category 2, but took no action. Within a day, the levees failed and major devastation occurred.¹⁰ Today Katrina is understood not as a natural disaster but as a catastrophe wrought by exploitation of natural resources, corruption, neglect, and systemic racism. Over two thousand people died, seven hundred were considered missing, and over one million were displaced from their homes, many never to return. 

When the levees failed, artist Jonathan Traviesa stayed in New Orleans for six days rescuing people and animals by boat, and in that time found two hours to take photographs. He reflects, “Those two hours were really important to me, to bear witness in the way I’ve committed to: with a camera. Otherwise, I was just surviving and helping others.”¹¹ From an inflatable raft, he took a photograph of his legs sticking out in rubber boots, framing a crumpled Orleans Avenue sign. The image conveys the surreal experience of floating high amidst street signs and tree branches with the flood waters eerily mirroring the houses in reflective undulations and the blue sky and sunshine sharply contrasting the destruction. As a self-portrait, it shows the artist continuing to photograph when possible, while diligently finding ways to rescue his neighbors, friends, and pets. Interspersing the traumatic experience with creative work was, he says, “existentially recuperative.”

He photographed many flooded places in the immediate aftermath and returned to New Orleans five weeks after Katrina, embarking on a sign project that would go on to be awarded best art show of the year by the city’s residents. He printed the original photographs of flooded and damaged sites, adhered them to yard signs, and arranged each photograph intentionally on-site so that when he re-photographed the place along with the original image, residents could clearly see how much progress had been made. Traviesa explains, “The sign project was special because the world had been inundated with Katrina imagery, and my goal was to do something different and new, more meaningful. There were so many yard signs in New Orleans at this time, signs letting neighbors know they’d returned, construction signs. … Yard signs were a main way to communicate with one another at that time, so I appropriated that form of communication.”¹²

When his project gained acclaim and attention, a colleague asked if he intended to continue working on Katrina, suggesting that perhaps he was afflicted with catastrofilia, and Traviesa experienced a moment of clarity, realizing, as he told us in an interview, he “did not want to be a catastrofiliac,” meaning: someone who is drawn to disaster imagery, replicating it like the dominant media. He has chosen not to address Katrina in his work since, but remains devoted to his beloved community. Similarly, when Colleen Mullins visited New Orleans a year after Katrina from her home in Minneapolis, she was determined, in her words, “not to make disaster porn.” A photographer dedicated to urban forestry, Colleen was struck by the damage to the city’s trees, a 70% canopy loss caused not just by the storm and flooding, but by mismanaged recovery efforts; a significant amount of this damage was wrought by the Army Corps of Engineers, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and visiting power companies. She decided to survey the damage and made a detailed plan to travel in concentric circles across wide swaths of the city, chronicling the urban forest, resulting in an ongoing series, Elysium. She told us this project underscores the “important process of methodically looking at space.” Photographing the city since 2006, every three to six weeks for the first three years, then at least once or twice annually thereafter, she considers this sustained activity a “push-back against the brief encounter.” 

In 2016, she revisited all the sites and realized some trees that were previously protected had been cut down. The Y shaped trees, those that had been cut by power companies to repair power lines, had continued to grow in that disconcerting shape. This Y shape can be held in conversation with the “Katrina X,” FEMA’s system of spray-painting “search codes,” known to residents as “X-codes” or “Katrina crosses,” on houses to indicate what search teams found inside. Moving clockwise from the left quadrant, the codes conveyed: the rescue squad, the squad’s arrival time, a summary of hazards, and at the bottom, the number of people inside, both living and deceased. These marks can still be found on buildings and in some cases have been rendered as commemorative works of art, such as the metalwork by Erica Larkin Gaudet. 

In another sustained action, Arkansas-based photographer Dave Anderson focused his lens on recovery efforts on a single block in the city in the Lower Ninth Ward from 2006 to 2009. Blue Maxine captures Maxine Richards leaning against the window of her FEMA trailer, longing for her home, the restoration of which took years. Like Traviesa and Mullins, Anderson photographs the same spaces over time, in this case faithfully documenting domestic spaces repeatedly as homes are restored, allowing survivors to see recovery. This is particularly impactful for people who felt the recovery efforts dragging on over time, notoriously impeded by mismanagement, miscommunication, lack of a workforce, and a host of other challenges. He documented Maxine Richardson’s hallway in July of 2007, nearly two full years after the storm, languishing in a state of disrepair. Nine months later, he captured the space born anew, bathed in warm yellow tones and emanating light. A child walks through a doorway, signaling that Ms. Richardson’s house is restored and full of life.

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Sensation: Mediating Memory

In the aftermath of Katrina, photographer Kevin Kline was distraught by the mass exodus from his neighborhoods of Bywater, Marigny, Saint Roch, and Saint Claude. He had been taking portraits of his enigmatic neighbors for years, respectfully celebrating their uniqueness in a series titled Someday You Will Be a Memory. Kline covered the facade of his house with the portraits he had taken before the storm, so that those who remained could remember those lost and dislocated. Kline explained to us that this installation “symbolically repopulate[d] the neighborhood, and the city at large.” Folks could also visit the house to see themselves before the storm changed everything. Through the windows, Kline could hear passersby talking: “I regularly heard conversations concerning some of these people photographed—if they had returned, where they might have migrated to, what their experience might have been during the storm, or just regular domestic gossip: ‘Have you seen ___?, he owes me money!’” 

Katrina damaged more than one million homes, and many people were not allowed to return for some time, due to dangerous conditions. New Orleans established a program through which residents could briefly return to their homes, accompanied by trained counselors. A social worker and photographer living part-time in New Orleans, Jane Fulton Alt served in this role and chose not to turn her camera toward the residents in this most vulnerable time, but toward the subtle traces of looking and leaving, in this case the footprints of residents coming into their home, turning, and walking back out.

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Forecasting the Future

Due to the ever worsening climate change crisis, hurricanes are projected to become bigger and more intense, developing more rapidly and leaving people with less time to prepare, amplifying the sensations people will feel: the anticipation more stressful, the sound more terrifying, the desire to bear witness more pressing, and the need to mediate memory more fraught. As sensational media images spread, artists will also generate new works that humanize the experience and encourage systemic change—governmental, societal, environmental—and necessitate even closer attention to the ethics of image-making. 

The spaces forever changed by Hurricanes Katrina and María are intrinsically connected by their Caribbeanness, shared histories of colonialism and transatlantic slavery, and deeply institutionalized racism. These storms brought much needed global attention to the continued systems of inequity that allowed preventable deaths to occur, and their aftermaths to so disproportionately impact Black and Brown communities and other disenfranchised people. Katrina and María wrought sweeping public health crises, as weak power systems imperiled those with health conditions, rampant mold led to respiratory illnesses, and exposure to toxins caused lifelong health issues. Survivors continue to grapple with mental health challenges steeped in trauma. These events also shifted the conversation around climate change, racism, colonialism, and second class citizen subjects to the U.S., sounding global alarms for what the future might look like if storms continue without infrastructure ever being properly rebuilt. 

For some, these overlapping conditions may be unthinkable–leaving them to wonder particularly how these tragedies could unfold in the U.S. and its territories. For some artists on the ground, a primary task is to confront and capture the unimaginable. As Hurricane María lumbered away from Puerto Rico, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz thought that she should document the visual destruction, but instead she turned toward a feeling: an uncanny impression of concurrent destruction and reconstruction, a sense of how difficult it was to convey the experiences of living through the storm and trying to convey it. To do so, she brilliantly projected her footage of the aftermath through a piece of broken glass she found by a lighthouse after the storm, poetically obscuring the images of destruction. 

While these spaces are forever entwined by catastrophe, they are also remarkable for their rich cultures of self- and collective-expression, creative communities beloved for processing the complexities of history, the present, and the future through arts of myriad forms like poetry, song, dance, graffiti, parades, protests, and here: stitching pathways, exploring the sonic wonders of the wind, time traveling via signage, reclaiming remnants, repopulating a neighborhood through portraiture, and beyond. 

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1. Hannah Ryan, personal interview with Melinda González, June 1, 2022. This quote is attributed to Dr. González.
2. See Melinda González, “Colonial Abandonment and Hurricane María: Puerto Rican Material Poetics as Survivance,” ETropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics 21, no. 2 (2022): 140–161; Melinda González, “Mitigating Disaster in Digital Space: DiaspoRicans Organizing after Hurricane María,” International Journal of Mass Emergencies & Disasters 38, no. 1 (2020): 43-53.
3. Frances Gallardo in discussion with Hannah Ryan, Zoom, June 3, 2022.
4. Ibid.
5. The practice of naming hurricanes in various stages prior to their arrival is fraught because Spanish colonizers named them for Catholic saints; practices changed when the U.S. took over Puerto Rico in 1898 and hurricanes were given women’s names, which feminists later protested and halted. 
6. Frances Gallardo in discussion with Hannah Ryan, Zoom, June 3, 2022.
7. Amaya Garcia, “Ciénaga and Recluso Made Albums That Capture the Sound of Hurricane María,” Bandcamp Daily, November 22, 2019. 
8. These works are reminiscent of Dawn DeDeaux’s work on watermarks in New Orleans, as reflections on flooding in homes after Hurricanes Katrina (2005) and Ida (2021). 
9. Cedric Johnson, The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaking of New Orleans (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xxi.
10. Vincanne Adams, Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 22-24.
11. Hannah Ryan, interview with Jonathan Traviesa, December 12, 2019.
12. Hannah Ryan, interview with Jonathan Traviesa, December 12, 2019.

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  Hannah Ryan

  Dr. Hannah Ryan is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at St. Olaf College and researches the visual culture of the Americas through transatlantic, decolonial, and feminist lenses. In 2024 she published Nourish and Resist: Food and Feminisms in Contemporary Global Caribbean Art with Yale University Press, with Lesley Wolff. Having experienced an active hurricane season while living in South Florida, which included Katrina as it crossed the state, she has since been interested in artistic responses to hurricanes. In 2020 she curated the exhibition, We No Longer Consider Them Damaged: The Abstract Photographs of Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun, a body of photographs derived from negatives and slides altered by Katrina’s flood waters in their New Orleans studio. Ryan is currently completing a monograph on human milk in transatlantic visual culture, to be published by Yale UP. She holds a Ph.D. in Art History and Visual Studies from Cornell University.

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  Melinda González

  Dr Melinda González, born in Newark, New Jersey with ancestral home in Moca, Puerto Rico, is a Puerto Rican scholar-poet and an Assistant Professor in the Culture and Politics major at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. González conducts research on community organizing and displacement as responses to climate catastrophe and environmental contamination in Puerto Rico, New York, and New Jersey. González is a socio-cultural anthropologist, focused on environmental anthropology, whose work maps how disaster is differentially distributed across race, class, and gender, and she brings decolonial and indigenous research methods to the study of new media technologies in environmental justice studies.