The popular stereotype about artists is that their inspiration comes from a mysterious inner flame that flickers in their hearts and brains and results in art. That is partly true. But artists are just as often inspired by the extraordinary events that occur in the world around them. From wars and political struggles to such social and economic upheavals as the industrial revolution and the fight for civil rights, artists have always responded in the most eloquent way they know how—by making art.

So it is really no surprise that Thomas Mann, one of the nation’s best-known jewelry artists, has responded to the devastation that Hurricane Katrina wrought on his hometown of New Orleans with a remarkable body of artwork. Called Storm Cycle, An Artist Responds to Hurricane Katrina, the twenty panels in the show represent Mann’s selective documentary of the post-Katrina landscape in his beloved city. In twenty wall-hung, three-dimensional frames, each about twenty- four-inches tall by eighteen inches across, Mann uses found objects, photographs, his own text and brooches made specifically for each panel to offer snapshots of New Orleans as it struggles, both physically and emotionally, with the aftermath of the hurricane.

The exhibition, which was organized by Bellevue Arts Museum in Bellevue, Washington, a city just outside of Seattle, is searing. Visceral, sad, provocative, sometimes beautiful and sometimes humorous, Storm Cycle’s evocative power comes not only from Mann’s compassionate point of view but also from the fact that he is a consummate craftsman. By offering up a story told partly through the physical debris left in Katrina’s wake, Mann creates a physical, tactile landscape that cannot be ignored. And since each “panel” includes a detachable brooch that could actually be worn, the pieces also have a political charge. Wearing the brooches would be akin to witnessing the violence of the disaster and the natural and man-made tragedies that occurred in its wake.

The wall text that Mann wrote to accompany the panels is lengthy but well worth reading. For one thing, it tells you who Mann is. Anyone who admires jewelry art of course knows that he is a master craftsman with more than three decades of work behind him. But in the wall texts he also reveals that he is a close observer of his city and his neighbors. And he has a barely checked sense of outrage over the mismanagement and corruption that has plagued the city’s recovery.

One of the most moving panels in Storm Cycle is called Blue Roofs. The frame of the box is covered in blue plastic tarp, the type of plastic covering used by contractors who need to temporarily cover work sites to keep out rain. The blue plastic should be a symbol of recovery and rebuilding. But in the text accompanying Blue Roofs, Mann says that it is common knowledge among contractors in New Orleans that although the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) paid for high quality blue tarp, middle men substituted cheaper, unreinforced tarp, pocketing the difference in the cost of the two. Blue Roofs shows both kinds of tarp, and the reinforced tarp is a darker blue. The aerial photograph in Blue Roofs shows a New Orleans neighborhood where virtually every house is covered in the lighter colored, inexpensive tarp, which Mann said mostly flew off when the winds from Hurricane Rita swept through the city some weeks after Katrina. The brooch pinned to Blue Roofs is a red steel outline of a six-inch-long by four-inch-wide building. There are weather vanes on the little building. But there is no roof.

Other panels have names such as Mud n’ Mold, Stranded—Convention Center, FEMA Trailer, and My Boat. They are about the mud and crud that seeped into most homes; the hopelessness and outright fear felt by the many mostly poor people stuck for days in the now infamously unready convention center; the FEMA-supplied trailers that people are living in while they try to restore their homes; and Mann’s own small sailboat, which was torn apart at its moorings during the hurricane.

In all these pieces Mann’s use of physical materials hits home. In Mud n’ Mold he includes a section of a kitchen countertop that was so stained by the mud and water that it looks more like an ancient artifact than someone’s kitchen counter. It is certainly ruined. The brooch part of Mud n’ Mold includes a six-inch-long corked laboratory tube of bleach, which is one of the few substances that will combat mold.

In Stranded—Convention Center, Mann shows black and white photographs of the exhausted, frightened crowds at the convention center. The brooch shows a color photograph of a woman wearing only slacks and tank top on her knees, either crying or screaming. Mann says her name is Angela Perkins and that she was at the Convention Center Boulevard on September 2, 2005, pleading for help. At the bottom of the box are little envelopes of USA Government-issued freeze-dried meals. The plain brown food packages are printed with ridiculously useless information about the nutritional value of the foodstuffs inside, and the food packages’ graphics of families happily eating the foods suggest the kind of the hopelessly inadequate 1950s government mindset in which children were drilled on how to duck under their school desks to save themselves from nuclear fall-out. The food packages are clearly no comfort to the woman pleading for help on her knees.

But there is also humor and hope in Storm Cycle. FEMA Trailer shows a young couple with a child living in a trailer parked next to their house. Mann tells us that the young father is his studio manager and that the family is making headway toward restoring their house. The brooch is a cheerful-looking five-inch-long acrylic trailer with photographs in the windows of the man, his wife and their infant. It looks charmingly like something from Sesame Street.

In his artist’s statement Mann writes that in his college years he admired Joseph Cornell, who was famous for his wall-hung, glass-fronted “boxes” containing found objects assembled into unlikely but evocative juxtapositions. The frames, or boxes or panels—whatever one prefers to call them, —that Mann has used to organize the structure of Storm Cycle owe a small nod of homage to Cornell. The similarity stops there, however. While Cornell, who was essentially a surrealist, suggested the vague, odd images of dreams, Mann’s Storm Cycle is explicit. Mann is not subtle. He wants us to understand New Orleans’s devastation, its grief and its first steps toward recovery. It is an openhearted response from an artist who loves his city.

Thomas Mann: Storm Cycle will be traveling to these venues in 2007: January 22 through February 24 at Baum School of Art, Allentown, PA. April 7 through June 16 at Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, MA. July 5 through August 31 at Blue Spiral Gallery, Asheville, NC. September 10 through October 21 at Made in Metal Gallery, Baltimore, MD.November 18 through January 27, 2008, at National Ornamental Metal Museum, Memphis, TN.

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