Michael Stanley wasn't planning to evacuate when Hurricane Katrina set her sights on New Orleans. The city had missed numerous hurricanes over the years and he didn't think this one would be any different. Besides, he didn't have the money to leave town.
But the day before Katrina hit, Stanley realized this one was going to be different. He packed three days' worth of clothes and his two guitars and drove up to stay with his parents in Missouri. When he returned to New Orleans three months later, the young artist discovered he had lost everything.
Three years later, Stanley has a master of fine arts degree from Iowa State University and is teaching classes at the College of Design. He used his experiences from Hurricane Katrina and turned them into art, which has helped him recover from the blow that left a hole in his heart and a bitter taste in his mouth.
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The Kansas City, Mo., native went to Texas A&M University to study marine biology. He ended up at the University of South Dakota with a major in sculpture and minor in printmaking.
Art "was just a better fit" for him, Stanley said.
He had been drawing since he was a little kid, obsessed with comic books and the way they depicted people and actions.
While he was studying in Texas, he spent time working on ships with the Merchant Marine and traveling along the Mississippi, where he discovered the vibrant city of New Orleans.
He ended up moving there and lived in New Orleans for three years, working at the New Orleans School of Glassworks.
"I really loved that city," he said. "What's not to enjoy about New Orleans? It's its own little world."
Stanley had just been accepted into the University of New Orleans Master of Fine Arts program when Hurricane Katrina made herself known in the Gulf of Mexico in August 2005.
He helped board up the Glassworks building in the downtown business district on Saturday, Aug. 27, before going to a hurricane party that night. He woke up late the next day, Sunday, Aug. 28, and turned on the Weather Channel to see a meteorologist tell people to get out of New Orleans or they would die.
"That really just hit me. I really didn't think it was going to hit," Stanley said.
He decided to pack up, leave his ground floor apartment in a carriage house in Uptown New Orleans, and drive to his parents' house in Branson, Mo.
He watched in disbelief at the destruction and the people stranded by the storm and left behind by the government.
"I wasn't expecting this miracle, overnight fix," he said. But he hoped things would improve as time went on.
"I just felt so bad for those people ... it could have been me," he said.
Stanley would not be able to return to New Orleans for three months. He moved in with his grandmother in Kansas City, Mo., after staying with his parents for a week, and worked at a local artist's metal fabrication studio.
When Stanley finally got to see what was left of New Orleans, he was completely overwhelmed.
"It was just devastation, it was just awful," he said. "It was something you'd see in a movie ... I was waiting to wake up."
The images still stand out in his head: spray-painted 'X's on buildings that had been searched, rows of stinking refrigerators lined up along the streets, cars that had been picked up by the water and deposited in the middle of streets and yards.
He found a shock when he reached his apartment; the landlord had taken a bulldozer through and thrown everything away, including Stanley's sculptures, which would have likely been salvageable despite the six feet of water that had been in the building.
Stanley had nothing.
Art as therapy
He stayed around to help with the cleanup, moving from place to place; an attic here, an empty house there.
The University of New Orleans was closed indefinitely; Stanley tried to apply to other graduate programs, but no one would take him without examples of his work, all of which were gone.
His sister, Katy, began to notice an air of depression settling over him. She made contact with the College of Design at Iowa State University, where her husband's brother had studied architecture.
They accepted Stanley into the program with only a handful of slides that he had made of photos his grandmother took of his sculptures. He began his studies in January 2006, barely five months after losing everything - hopes, dreams, faith in fellow man - in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
"It was really a blessing" to be accepted, he said. "Iowa State has been really good to me."
Stanley used his time at ISU to focus his frustrations over the incompetence of the government he saw after the hurricane struck. His thesis project, "Katrina's Crescendo," was the pinnacle of his struggles to overcome the bitterness and embrace hope for the future.
The project comprises two kinetic sculptures made from found objects, including scrap metal from a sunken ship in New Orleans.
The first sculpture, "W Making Machine," expressed his anger with the government.
"It's a machine that has the appearance of function, but it doesn't work," Stanley said. "I really felt the government was not working for its people during Hurricane Katrina."
The small-scale sculpture appears to resemble an industrial neighborhood; there is a dome to represent the Superdome, a factory for the shipping yards, a water tower sitting on an oil rig representing government special interests, and a backhoe for the destruction. He built a tiny, working harmonica that is hidden inside the dome as a metaphor for the music and hidden parts of New Orleans.
As a counter-balance, Stanley created a large-scale sculpture called "The New Orleans Community Music Machine," a massive structure that requires four people to operate and creates music through fans, organ pipes, drums and cymbals.
"This is my answer to Hurricane Katrina," he said. "The whole idea behind it is people working together to achieve a common goal ... what the government should have done."
The project became a sort of catharsis for Stanley, who wanted to use his talents to be productive rather than sit around and complain about what went wrong.
"It was very helpful to me to help me get over the issues I had," he said.
Stanley continues to visit New Orleans at least two or three times every year, hanging out with friends and continuing the cleanup effort.
"I like to go down there as often as I can," he said. "I'd really like to go back and live down there again someday."
In the meantime, he hopes his artwork will help people understand that the concept of community is important to uphold in this individualistic world.
"I think if people work together more, there'd be fewer problems or at least easier solutions," he said.
Laura Pieper can be reached
at 232-2161, Ext. 353,
or lpieper@amestrib.com.
