By BETH KOHN

SENTINEL CORRESPONDENT

Decaying shotgun houses and abandoned streets inhabit the New Orleans of today, and reconstruction of the storm-flattened city has become a political volleyball as the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches. As the city debates its future, a new art exhibit at San Francisco's Museum of the African Diaspora captures the emotional shockwave of people struggling to assess and reclaim interrupted lives.

A photography and multimedia show commissioned for the 200-year anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase, Carrie Mae Weems' "The Louisiana Project" surveys the region's nuanced legacy of slavery. At the time, the Louisiana Purchase was possibly the largest land sale in history, and French leader Napoleon Bonaparte funneled the proceeds into a military response to Toussaint L'Ouverture's slave rebellion in Haiti. The new territory doubled the size of the nascent United States, and the show was conceived as a reflection on the power imbalances that have existed since that acquisition.

Weems is known for her biting social criticism and fascination with folklore. "The focus of my work is to describe simply and deeply those aspects of American culture in need of deeper illumination," she says. In these black-andwhite portraits, she uses Mardi Gras and masquerade rituals to probe the relationships between New Orleans' European, African and Caribbean descendants and the lingering inequities between them. The result is a compelling examination of sexuality, race and culture with the unifying theme of searching for one's individual and collective identity.

In a series titled "The Witness," Weems probes the disconnection of being on the outside looking in. In each image, we see the back of an African-American woman (the artist) in a flowing print house dress, gazing longingly at a landscapes just out of reach: receding train tracks, ornate above-ground tombs, a deserted and partially boarded up public housing project. "A Distant View" depicts a pristine white-columned plantation house, the gleaming and imposing mansion anchoring a dream of nostalgia and subtle resentment. Seated on a sweeping lawn in the foreground, the woman resembles a sleepwalker, imagining— or perhaps recalling— life in the Big House.

The Museum of the African Diaspora, known as MoAD, opened in December 2005 in the heart of downtown San Francisco, and the institution sees the show as a seamless fit for its vision.

"At a time when New Orleans culture is undergoing phenomenal changes that, coincidentally, all relate to MoAD's founding themes or origins, movement, adaptation, and transformation," says V. Denise Bradley, MoAD's executive director. "This presentation of Carrie Mae Weems' work is vitally important."

The video installation of "Meaning and Landscape" comments on the slavery-era hierarchies between white masters, their wives and their Creole mistresses. Filtered through a shadowy overlay of lattice-work fence, we watch the narcoleptic movements of faceless silhouettes. Seated women dressed in bustle-and-ruffle antebellum finery primp demurely in their hand mirrors. In counterpoint, a woman in the trappings of servitude — an unadorned frock and knotted head kerchief — paces with a candelabra. The viewer becomes voyeur as social disguises are discarded and passive poses turn provocative.

New Orleans will undoubtedly rise again, though the question of in what form remains unclear. Seen through the prism of Hurricane Katrina, Weems' ghostly ambiguous poses and endless empty backdrops are jarring metaphors for lives lost and a ravaged city grappling to preserve but still scrutinize its history.

Contact Beth Kohn at fiercesf@igc.org.

{THROUGH OCT. 9 Museum of the African Diaspora, 685 Mission St. (at 3rd St.), San Francisco. (415) 358-7200; www.moadsf.org. Admission is $10 adults; $5 students & seniors. 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday & Wednesdays through Saturdays; noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. Closed Tuesdays. Artist's talk, Sept. 30, 1 to 2:30 p.m. by RSVP only at (415) 358-7215.}