After Katrina’s Deadly Waters, Therapists Brought Watercolors
As humans, we oftentimes turn to other mediums to express how we’re feeling. For me, some days I doodle. Other days I play the guitar. I believe that art, in all of its genres, is able to articulate complicated feelings in ways that words can’t. Especially after traumatic events like Hurricane Katrina, sometimes words aren’t the best way to process emotions.
Quotes taken from Michaela Towfighi at The New York Times:
"After Katrina made landfall on Aug. 29, 2005, killing nearly 1,400 people and devastating the birthplace of jazz, art therapists from across the country descended on Louisiana. Bearing crayons, paint and sheets of white paper, they hoped that children would begin to draw what was too difficult to say aloud" (Towfighi, 2025).
"Their drawings of houses had recognizable doors and windows, but one of the most striking differences Leopold noticed was that the walls had been rendered as large triangles, not the square bases with pointed tops you would typically see in a kindergarten classroom" (Towfighi, 2025).
"The children who lived through Katrina were simply drawing roofs. The rest of the house was flooded in their minds" (Towfighi, 2025).
"The power of expressing yourself through art still rings true for Twohearts, now 29. During the coronavirus pandemic, when she was out of work and stuck at home, she turned to making digital images online. The surrealist pictures of skeletons and eyeballs rest on galactic backgrounds" (Towfighi, 2025).
"The experience has also stuck with Leopold, the art therapist. After fires ravaged Los Angeles neighborhoods this year, she contacted her local Red Cross branch to help people who were displaced" (Towfighi, 2025).
"Shelters across the area were assembling recovery boxes. With her assistance, many of them included a simple set of art supplies so children could draw as they were resettled" (Towfighi, 2025).
"'Give them a piece a paper and a pencil; they’ll do what they need to do,' she said" (Towfighi, 2025).
When I hear these stories of massive suffering due to natural disasters, I think of Greta Thunberg’s speech at the U.N in 2019. She said, “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing" (NPR, 2019). We know that climate change causes severe weather patterns. We know that greenhouse gases create warmer temperatures. We also know that whatever we are doing in our fight to be sustainable is not enough.
After reading this article, I wonder how many more Katrinas we will have because of pollution, carbon emissions, and deforestation. Do you think that 50 years from now, our children’s children will be art therapying their way out of a natural disaster that we caused?
No generative artificial intelligence (AI) was used in the writing of this work.
References
Towfighi, M. (2025, August 29). After Katrina’s deadly waters, therapists brought watercolors . The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/29/arts/design/hurricane-katrina-anniversary-art-therapy.html
NPR. (2019, September 23). Transcript: Greta Thunberg’s speech at the U.N. Climate Action Summit. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2019/09/23/763452863/transcript-greta-thunbergs-speech-at-the-u-n-climate-action-summit
