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Gallery exhibit

“Waterbourne Witness: Elegies for My New Orleans”  – an exhibit of 15 paintings and a book by Shelley Holl that’s been on view continuously since the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina – is on display in the Fine Arts Gallery.  August marks the fifth anniversary of the hurricane.  The exhibit at Plymouth will run until Sept. 8.

Over the course of seven years as a resident of New Orleans and five years as a columnist for the Times-Picayune newspaper, Shelley Holl formed an unbreakable bond with the people and places of South Louisiana.  She describes a rich society, where everyone told stories that tied the neighborhood snowball stand, corner bar or barbershop into a complicated web of family, parish and city history.

After the levees broke in New Orleans and the city sank beneath the muddy waters of Lake Pontchartrain,  she watched as one familiar corner after another appeared in almost unrecognizable form on her television set. When the flood waters receded and the extent of Katrina's devastation came to light, she realized that the city that lived so vividly in her memory, is, in some neighborhoods, now little more than that: a place that exists in mind and heart alone.