sequins, glass beads, plastic & resin cast of artist’s face, faux flower decorations,
snake plant from Brazil planted in soil from various locations in New Orleans, 44 X 34 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
On the morning of August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall near Buras-Triumph, Louisiana, about sixty miles southeast of New Orleans.[1] Institutional failures at the local, state, and federal levels contributed to the deaths of an estimated 1,833 people.[2] This partial record barely touches the broader cultural context shaping New Orleans-born artist Jessica Monette’s interdisciplinary practice. The storm’s aftermath is part of a continuum of systemic issues, as Katrina cast light on preexisting inequities that still condition daily life. For Monette, “themes of water carry the emotional wounds of unwelcome change, paralleling the transatlantic slave trade to the systems of marginalization exacerbated by Katrina’s forced exodus that underscore persistent patterns of racial hierarchy.”[5]
Monette renders water a cyclical actor that narrates the loss of ancestral and personal histories, of weather systems and systems of weathering. Her work is a meditation on the simultaneous, where water becomes witness. Her practice of archival fabrication, alongside scholar Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation, transcends the spatiotemporal registers of environmental calamity and institutional violence, reconstituting the aesthetic atmosphere of her personal archive. The erasures produced by Katrina function as a bridge that renders diasporic memory legible in alternate geographies, as alive in their disruption.
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, twenty years later, I met with Jessica Monette via Zoom to discuss her art as an act of remembrance, a testament to cultural persistence, and a requiem for institutional failure and displacement. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Bryn Evans: I’m wary of using the word anniversary to describe Hurricane Katrina, because it feels overly positive, almost celebratory. What does it mean to commemorate a disaster?
Jessica Monette: Remembering has become such an important part of my life, because this country tends to have a short memory with topics pertaining to Black communities. It’s become my life’s work to commemorate Katrina because it still hasn’t been talked about enough.
BE: How does that manifest daily?
Through the experience of losing my family archive and trying to reestablish it, I’ve come to realize the holes that were there before Katrina. Now I’m creating and collecting archives that will have a place in the world. I’ve dedicated my life’s work to unpacking Katrina as a contemporary epicenter of anti-Blackness.
JM: I don’t have family out here in California with me, so my ancestor altar is my family here. I acknowledge them and everything that they’ve given for me to be here, daily with my son.
BE: Can you say more about how these things predated Katrina, but the disaster being the event that necessitated the reckoning. The act of remembering is a labor that, until accosted with the fragility of memory, isn’t really valued or prioritized. It just becomes, “Oh, you know, this exists somewhere,” until it’s actually lost.
JM: Katrina opened the door for me to become invested in my family’s history, because I watched Katrina become a memory to this country so quickly. It happened in August 2005, and by early next year, it was not a thing anymore. But we’re still living with this.
BE: It’s making me think about the recent floods in Texas and North Carolina. In tandem with one of your works, Kat 4, 5078, I’m curious about what you might have to say about the news media’s commodification of traumatic lived experiences through its rapid circulation.
JM: From what I remember with Katrina, the media had a very disjointed lack of humanity, even in the moments that tragedy struck. I’m 18, 19 years old, and I’m looking at news reporters in helicopters recording the devastation. There’s people stranded on their roofs who need help, but no one is stopping to help because that’s not their job. Their job is to record. It felt like National Geographic to me. Like, “Oh, we don’t interfere with the animals.” There’s children on roofs who haven’t had water in days, and y’all are just reporting like it’s nothing?
The media took and spun narratives — it’s the difference between white folks trying to survive and Black folks being looters. We forget that what we’re watching on the news is a business. It’s not about humanity. It’s about ratings. In this country, the pace of everything is so fast. It’s like they don’t want you to slow down. Because if you slow down and actually think about the things that are going on, you might actually get upset and do something.
As an artist, I believe my job is to remind people that this country hasn’t progressed as much as it proclaims it has—the aftermath of enslavement and settler colonialism remains relevant. Since Katrina, there’s been disaster after disaster in the U.S. and Caribbean, and the response to them hasn’t changed much.
BE: Do you mean the government response? Media?
JM: All of it. The media may be more careful with their framing, but federal responses haven’t been much different. We rarely address the structural conditions that marginalized communities face beforehand and how these disasters exacerbate what was previously there or not there. A lot of folks can’t afford home insurance or live in places where there’s enough greenery to soak up rainwater. Deinvestment in infrastructure, delayed aid, inadequate federal response — you can’t silo off these issues. One relates to the other.
BE: Yeah. I feel like Hurricane Katrina really highlights how when people say certain words, they’re referring to other things. Like as you’re talking, you keep saying Black people, and I understand why you’re saying Black people, but when people hear New Orleans or Lower Ninth Ward, when people hear these different terms, do they understand that we’re talking about race and racialized geographies and socioeconomic disparity?
JM: And, a lot of times, especially in academia, people don’t want you to say that. I’m tired of tiptoeing around that—name the thing. This is what it is. It’s Black communities and low-income communities of color. I’m not about to intellectualize that for you.
BE: Mhmm. What are you currently working on?
JM: I’m teaching a class at Stanford that’s centered on New Orleans, and I have shows coming up at de Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University and Jonathan Carver Moore Gallery in San Francisco. I also just received my first public artwork commission.
Over the summer, I went to New Orleans in June with my son and documented the land that my grandparents lived on. My mom’s side of the family is Creole and from the Seventh Ward, and my dad’s side of the family is from the Lower Ninth Ward. The house that my mom grew up in is no longer there, butI tend to take soil from places that feel important to me, so I took some soil from that land. I took some images of it, too. We found a grave site that had thirteen members of our family in there dating all the way back to the 1830s.
I usually work in abstraction and assemblage, but recently I’ve been working on some figurative abstraction and works on paper. The cool thing about my solo show at the de Saisset Museum is that there will be portions of the exhibition that rotate throughout the year, so some of what’s going on in my mind and in the studio will be coming in and out of the exhibition space.
New Orleans, and bamboo umbrella armature, 7 x 6.5 ft. Image courtesy of the artist.
BE: Wow. It sounds like a beautiful continuation from your show at the Museum of the African Diaspora. Your work Untitled (Dissemination) blends the cultural iconographies of New Orleans and Itaparica, Brazil, where you completed a residency at Instituto Sacatar a few years ago. How do these two places act as nodes of diasporic memory?
JM: It’s just amazing to me how strongly memory lives in our bodies, our psyches, and our souls. To feel that same spirit in two geographically separate places. Black people are magic. We’re magic to live through all of these atrocities and to still have common threads. That’s a whole body of work on its own: Black people and their relationship with water. The Middle Passage, Baptism, water as memory, water as witness. Water holds it all, but it’s not the water’s fault.
BE: And it’s not being created nor destroyed. It is being cycled. The same drops that came down twenty years ago, they are just somewhere else in the world, still flowing, still circulating.
JM: Still giving life. Water is the predominant source of all life. Without it, we all gone. It should unite us, yet experience shapes how we see it. Many Black people have a certain connotation with water, just like we have a certain connotation with rope. If you put “Black” and “rope” in the same sentence, there’s a connotation there, but what happens when you look at the object or its use? What if you use it for something else? What if you try to bend the connotation or talk about the material’s possibilities at the same time? That happens a lot in my practice, where I’m talking about a lot of things at one time, because I feel like that’s what the Black experience is. We are simultaneous. I know that’s why I work the way I do, because our existence is too complicated to flatten it into one thing. Rope is that material for me: heavy in historical trauma but generative in its strength, collective fibers working in unison. A lot of my work feels like a totem or something that holds energies. I need it to do as much as I can make it do at one time.
BE: How does your practice draw on the diasporic tensions between rootedness and displacement?
JM: I feel like that’s something we’re constantly doing. We’re constantly being displaced and constantly having to reroot in other places. That’s a big question. I’m constantly trying to unpack that in my practice. Twenty years after Katrina and I still feel displaced. I’m not sure that feeling will ever go away.
BE: The word thriving, not just surviving, but thriving. New Orleans is a tourist hub. In that way, I think there is this idea that the city is thriving culturally. It’s overflowing with it. I’m interested in that duality where there’s a popular cultural perception of a place that overshadows the shared lived reality of it.
JM: Because people feel the magic of New Orleans. It’s one of the few places that is still rooted in its history, for better or worse, and people don’t feel that in other places. But at the same time, this happens a lot with tourism. It’s extractive. You go there; you stay in a certain part of the city. You don’t venture outside to where the actual people who are helping run the city, who are serving you, who are washing the dishes, who are taking the trash out, who are making New Orleans run as a tourism industry, live. I believe that if people really did care about New Orleans and what it offers to people, there should be some advocacy around the people who make the city what it is. It’s like you’ve personified the city as this entity, as this thing, but you forget that the people are the city. Without them, you’re not coming here.
BE: What would it mean to see increased advocacy for arts and culture in New Orleans? What do you think that would look like?
JM:
I’d love to see a shift in resources to provide living wages, stipends, residencies, etc. to artists and culture workers because the culture that people come to New Orleans for doesn’t exist without NOLA’s Black communities.
[1] History.com Editors, “Hurricane Katrina: 10 Facts About the Deadly Storm and Its Legacy,” History.com, A&E Television Networks, August 29, 2019, https://www.history.com/news/hurricane-katrina-facts-legacy.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Eric Lipton, “Engineers’ Failures Cited in New Orleans Flooding,” New York Times, June 1, 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/01/us/01cnd-corps.html.
[4] “Hurricane Katrina Facts and Legacy,” History, accessed June 15, 2025, https://www.history.com/articles/hurricane-katrina-facts-legacy.
[5] Jessica Monette, “BIO,” JessicaMonette.com, accessed June 15, 2025, https://www.jessicamonette.com/bio.
