Drawers Of Disaster Displayed On Bridge

By Andrea Appleton
POSTED DEC.29, 2006

New Orleans artist Jana Napoli thought it fitting that her installation of dresser drawers, salvaged in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, would be displayed near the World Trade Center site.

“It’s in a place where people can understand what sudden loss is all about,” she said, speaking on the phone from New Orleans. “And I don’t think any place was more gracious to us after the storm than New York City.”

The 610 drawers Napoli collected can be seen on the Liberty Street Bridge from Jan. 4 through Feb. 9, courtesy of the World Financial Center and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. They will sit upright along a long platform spanning the length of the bridge, like so much abandoned luggage. The words of some of those who parted with the drawers as a result of the hurricane will scroll across electronic screens.  Of all the detritus of people’s lives that littered the streets after the storm, Napoli chose to collect drawers, because, she said, “it was a study in intimacy.” She removed their sodden contents—letters and cutlery and underwear and dolls and hand-sewn linens—before taking them.

“I fell in love with all the households,” she said. “It was incredibly sad. As I collected, I thought ‘America doesn’t think that we deserve to be helped.’”

Napoli conceived of the project in the midst of the hurricane, even as she watched her own home disintegrate. The roof to her apartment blew off in the storm, and water drenched her and her 92-year-old mother from above. As temperatures neared 100 degrees, the two of them fled to Baton Rouge two days later on just a quarter tank of gas.

Napoli returned to New Orleans a month later, determined to salvage something of the homes that had been lost. She set out alone in her van each morning for months, randomly traversing every neighborhood in the city.

Napoli searched for drawers that had been dumped on the curb, sometimes collecting as many as 50 a day. She wrote down the address where each drawer was found, and any other information she could gather about it, such as the kind of furniture it came from or the state of its former home. She stored the drawers in her mother’s gutted condo.

Sometimes people would stop and ask her what she was doing.

“I was afraid at first that people would think I was stealing something,” she said. But when Napoli told them she was building a memorial to New Orleans, and asked them what they wanted her to convey with it, she says they all had the same message. “Tell them we’re coming back,” they told her.

As a way of making those voices heard, Napoli is trying to find the owners of the drawers. She is collecting oral histories of their Katrina experiences, and so far has gathered a handful. As part of the search, volunteers are posting signs at the homes from which the drawers came.

Eventually, if she can find the funding, she hopes to have a vast database online, a virtual memorial where visitors can click on a drawer and learn about its former owner. All the drawers have already been categorized by zip code and address, and put online at www.floodwall.org.

It is not the first time that Napoli has found herself at the crossroads of art and social justice. She is the founder of YA/YA (Young Aspirations/Young Artists), Inc., a renowned New Orleans-based non-profit organization that provides opportunities in the art world for inner-city youth.

Napoli hopes that the next time “Floodwall” is displayed, it will be as a literal wall, eight feet by a towering 120 feet.

“It’s bigger than anything I’ve ever done,” she said. “To try to replicate the size of the loss meant something huge.”