Teens born after the storm confront its legacy, turning memory and imagination into a moving commemoration of survival on a levee wall in the Lower Ninth Ward.
In a city where memory is as layered as the soil beneath its streets, where culture rises defiantly through rhythm, ritual, and resilience, the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina arrives as both a milestone and a meditation.
For Brandan « BMike » Odums, the celebrated New Orleans-based visual artist and founder of Studio BE, it’s also a moment of generational handoff—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 said. « 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 nearly 2,000 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.
The storm caused an estimated $161 billion in damages, destroying or severely damaging more than 300,000 homes. A disproportionate number of fatalities occurred in Black and working-class communities. The Eternal Seeds curriculum began with a sobering realization: none of the students remembered Katrina. Most of their parents didn’t speak about it often. Some had never heard their families recount their own evacuations, losses, or returns.
« We even talked about playing Katrina Babies and then realized—they weren’t alive », Odums said.Trauma and Recovery
Instead of seeing this as a gap, the program treated it as a point of entry. The students spent their Fridays hearing firsthand stories from New Orleanians who lived through the catastrophe and its aftermath.
Guest speakers included musician Irvin Mayfield, poet Sunni Patterson, councilman Oliver Thomas, and former mayor Marc Morial. Each offered a personal lens on trauma, survival, and recovery. The mural they produced reflects that layered storytelling. Divided into three sections—pre-Katrina, Katrina, and post-Katrina/future—the work weaves together photographic references, news clippings, household items like keys and family albums, and drawings that envision what comes next.
« There’s all these artifacts that are painted on the wall to memorialize pre-Katrina New Orleans », Odums said. « Then there’s the flooding, the news, things they found when they researched.
