A Place That Calls to Artists and Culture Bearers

Carol Bebelle with the Ashé Cultural Arts Center is awakening the arts movement in Central City.

Knowing you’re not alone gives people strength in the face of adversity. Music, storytelling, and familiar surroundings provide a sense of comfort. The Ashé Cultural Arts Center was blessed during Katrina, as it was spared any physical damage. So our role was very wide. We were a big place that people could come to. After experiencing all the horror in the streets, when people walked in, they would breathe a sigh of relief. For them to be someplace that felt normal was a huge comfort.

We had just completed a community plan for Central City right before the storm, and we were already conversant with our communal sense of who we were and where we were going. Our manifesto calls us to create a quality community with all kinds of people who are taken care of. We take that intention, and we create rituals — ways in which people can come together to accomplish these visions.

We are now in phase two of our Truth Be Told project. We have done story circles about race and racism, built artwork, made films, and partnered with the Contemporary Arts Center. We worked with Eve Ensler, and helped bring The Vagina Monologues to New Orleans, to focus on women who experienced the disaster. It was a huge thing for New Orleans, and 40,000 people from around the world came.

Africans say that women hold up half the sky. And after Katrina, we had an instance where the world was literally falling apart, and the women were putting it back together — helping the children, the men, the parents, and at the same time going out working. These women needed a lifeline, so we created Our Sisters Making a Change, a dance program. We did second line, line dancing, salsa and samba, and African dance. That program thrived, and it’s still going on. We also do community sings now, which are opportunities for people to come together to do something they love to do. Singing is healthy for people, and not just physically, but spiritually.

Since Katrina, we have been able to assist our constituency of culture bearers and artists in many ways. In some instances we were able to hire artists, and to commission works from them. We started a support group for artists called Side by Side. And we acquired property that houses 29 local artists (soon to be 32). Our goal is to make artists a permanent part of Central City. We believe that artists and culture bearers are some of the best neighbors; they walk outside of the box and value difference. These are the folks who can take nothing and make something grand and glorious out of it. When you see the work these artists create, it totally changes your experience of the world.

This post is part of a series, “In Their Own Words”, that acknowledges the role that nonprofit leaders have played in the region’s recovery. Five years later, they’re still at work.