Rocky Mount, N.C.— North Carolina Wesleyan College’s Mims Art Gallery in the Dunn Center for the Performing Arts features “…and the levee broke: Meditations on the Power of Water,” an international response to Hurricane Katrina, April 6 – May 13. Proceeds from sales of the work go to the Hurricane Katrina Recovery Fund, a fund for children displaced by the disaster and developed by the National Art Education Association partnered with Illinois-based Dick Blick Art Materials. University students' works are for sale up to $125. Professional artists were asked to put a $500 limit on their works.

Rocky Mount needs no reminding just how devastating a hurricane and flood can be. We share the memories and the yet ongoing recovery from Hurricane Floyd. In 2005, when Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, local Rocky Mount empathy and action kicked in to assist the people of New Orleans and Mississippi. As in Rocky Mount, Gulf Coast recovery will continue for a decade or more.

Richmond artist and curator K.B. Basseches, who had firsthand experience with the flooding and long-term damage of the 2004 Tropical Storm Gaston in her city, was called to action in empathy and alarm at the magnitude of the destruction and dislocations caused by Hurricane Katrina. While waters were receding in New Orleans, Basseches contacted artists and art students, young and old, world-wide to consign artworks to a traveling art exhibition she was organizing titled “…and the levee broke: Meditations on the Power of Water”. With over 500 artworks submitted from as far away as Turkey, Korea, and Taiwan, Basseches curated and selected this exhibition with an eye to communicating the paradox of water as a force of life as well as destruction. “I felt responsible for helping,” Basseches explained. “And this was one gift I could give.”

The exhibition “…and the levee broke” was first shown at the Creative Change Center in Richmond and from there it traveled to California Baptist University in Riverside and on to Atlanta and Newark, Ohio. Wesleyan’s Mims Gallery is the last stop on this tour.

K.B. Basseches can be reached at kbbasseches@vcu.edu. Contact Professor Everett Mayo Adelman,Mims Gallery curator, at eadelman@ncwc.edu or 252-985-5268.