untitled (Hurricane Katrina flood)

Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, artist

1920–2012

untitled (Hurricane Katrina flood), 2005

Where object was made: United States

Material/technique: drawing; ballpoint pen; colored pencil; paper

Credit line: Collection of Linda Hattendorf, Taos, New Mexico

Accession number: EL2024.093

On display: Simons Gallery

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Street Nihonga: The Art of Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani

Mirikitani responded to Hurricane Katrina with drawings that merge news photographs of destruction in Baton Rouge and the Ninth Ward with his signature swirling flames and turbulent skies. Created soon after the 2005 storm, these works evoke the disaster’s human cost— more than 1,800 deaths and widespread displacement, especially in New Orleans’s Black communities. By transforming documentary images into charged landscapes, Mirikitani links Katrina to a lifetime of witnessing catastrophe and racial injustice.