Hurricane Katrina victim Karen Smith’s devastation is now art. She walked through an art gallery in the French Quarter with a sense of familiarity on Saturday.

Five years ago, Smith, a native of New Orleans, found her Lakeview home flooded with 10 feet of water. Smith and her husband, Jimmy, had to make a decision about the home they had lived in for 25 years – they decided to start all over and rebuild on the same site.. The Smith family moved into the newly rebuilt home in 2007.

Three years later, the Smiths can find before and after photographs of their home along the Williams Gallery walls as part of the Historic New Orleans Collection’s recently opened exhibition, “Katrina +5: Documenting Disaster.”

“It’s good to show people what we here have been through,” she said.

The exhibit reflects the damage inflicted by Hurricane Katrina and the progress New Orleans has made over the past five years. Residents and photographers affiliated with the Historic New Orleans Collection submitted the material used.

”Katrina +5” is a continuation of a 2006 exhibit, called “City of Hope,” that featured materials gathered by the collection a year after the hurricane.

Smith’s home was also featured in the 2006 exhibit. Back then, she felt it was difficult to view.

“I feel better now,” she said. “When I came to see it in ’06, it brought me back to the beginning.”

While the focus of the new exhibit is on the city’s recovery from Katrina, it also includes information about the past with a short documentary on Hurricane Betsy, a Category 4 storm that sent water gushing into Lake Pontchartrain and flooded parts of the city in 1965.

The exhibit also includes maps and photos from hurricanes in New Orleans dating to 1831, starting with the Great Barbados Hurricane.

JoAnn Lohergan, a survivor of Hurricane Betsy, said she recalled crying when she was 16 after realizing that she couldn’t find her dog in the wake of the storm.

Lohergan now lives in Mandeville and was at the gallery on Saturday viewing the exhibit. Her parents were among those devastated by Katrina.

Lohergan picked them up from their house in New Orleans two days before the storm. When they returned, she said, the house had been destroyed.

“It was like a war zone,” she said.

For Katrina survivors like Lohergan, the exhibit shows the resilience of the city’s residents.

Past and present photos of houses, businesses and streets that were swamped by Hurricane Katrina line the blue walls of the gallery space.

Visitors can listen to voices of residents that collection officials interviewed as a part of a separate initiative, “Through Hell and High Water: Katrina’s First Responders Oral History Project.”

As the “Katrina +5” exhibit captures the progress of New Orleans after Katrina, residents like Smith and Lohergan said they continue to cope.

“It’s not an easy progress, but we made it,” Smith said. “Some parts are slow and others are moving along faster.”

The exhibit is at the Williams Gallery, 533 Royal Street in the French Quarter, through Sept. 12. Admission is free.

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