When Hurricane Sally hit the Gulf Coast nearly two years ago, it struck at the heart of Mobiles, the treasured Place Bienville, forcing the removal of many of the town’s most beloved southern oaks and just as that. Many mobiles dear to centenarians had disappeared, but not completely. In fact, some are making a comeback right now in places and ways that might surprise you. There’s a lot of feeling, a lot of different styles and techniques used in the variety of artwork we have here and we’re so excited to be able to showcase that to the community. These works are now artistic creations made of wood from these fallen oak trees and they are now on display in the Council of Mobile Arts Gallery at the Sanger Theater. What you will see in the gallery is just a variety of utilitarian type works, shrines, paintings, chessboards, all sorts of different things and I was so impressed with what people come up with. Councilman Ben Reynolds has created a nice chair that he is going to give away to the mobile people and will have somewhere, I believe, at City Hall. But the job was not without difficulties. Artist Kathleen Kirk used her piece of wood to burn a portrait of Renaissance mobile man Eugene Walters. I will say it would be much harder than the bass wood I usually work with and for some artists the cracks in the storm damage would become a feature of the work itself. But it was truly an honor to work with this piece of wood. I’m glad I got to use it in a cool way and in a way that makes those trees valuable again.