Even now the children’s drawings are populated by alligators, dead birds, helicopters and rescue boats. At a session in May one 8-year-old, Brittney Barbarin, drew a swimming pool full of squiggly black lines. Asked who was in the pool, she replied, “Snakes.”

The drawings, photographs and sculptures, about 50 of which went on display Sunday at the New Orleans Museum of Art, are a good indicator of how children are coping, said Dr. Irwin Redlener, the co-founder of the Children’s Health Fund, which has provided mobile mental health clinics to some families along the Gulf Coast. The art also shows that the trauma did not end with the hurricane.

“The real prescription for these families is to get them back into a normal community,” Dr. Redlener said. “We’re treading water doing these things, when I’d like to take my prescription pad and write, ‘Home.’ ”

On Saturday a wild commotion greeted the arrival of the art therapists, who were handing out T-shirts and registering families for a bus trip to the museum the next day for the exhibition, “Katrina Through the Eyes of Children,” which runs through Oct. 7. The therapists asked the children to draw two pictures each, and then kept an eye out for indicators of deep disturbance, like a picture by Trinity Williams, 7, that showed a figure swimming with a shark. Turbulent blue lines covered the entire paper.

Trinity is an energetic child who likes to sing and dance, and play tricks like pulling her name tag off and plastering it across her mouth. Ms. Leopold coaxed her to sit at a picnic table and add things to the drawing that could help the swimmer: a pool float, an adult in a boat, a yellow sun.