It’s easy to forget there was once a modest working-class neighborhood along South Galvez Street, where twin billion-dollar hospitals now stand. The stretch of Mid-City was flooded by the levee failures following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Blocks of homes were demolished to make room for the medical complex that was envisioned as a health care industry boon. Homeowners were bought out, renters relocated, some historic structures uprooted and rolled away. In the end, no New Orleans neighborhood changed more completely.

Artists Monica Rose Kelly and Nik Richard hope the artwork they’ve installed along the South Galvez neutral ground between the gleaming hospitals will remind passers-by of the bitter price of progress. The Arts Council of New Orleans commissioned the creative team to produce the 22 metal panels that stretch from Canal Street to Tulane Avenue, between the University Medical Center that opened in 2015 and the New Orleans Veterans Affairs Medical Center that opened in 2016. Symbolically, the multipart artwork depicts the history of the 70-acre lost neighborhood that once surrounded it, from the earliest colonial times to the present. In Kelly and Richard’s telling, the hospitals were well-meant but were also a source of injustice.