NEW ORLEANS (AP) - There’s something alluring about artist Mitchell Gaudet’s newest artwork. It includes a full-length mirror polka-dotted with honey-colored palm-sized glass disks that shimmer like Champagne bubbles. But when you look more closely, the bubbles begin to burst.
The discs are cast-glass replicas of bull’s-eye targets. Each represents a 2019 Orleans Parish homicide victim. There are 119 in all. Each is etched with the victim’s name. What might have seemed an upbeat New Year’s display of some sort turns out to be a tally of tragedy.
Gaudet displayed the glinting sculpture, titled “Murder Rate 2019,” at the foot of the steps leading to City Hall on Wednesday (Jan. 8). Like an old-fashioned town crier, Gaudet took his message to the busy public square. There was no sign to explain the artwork, but when anyone paused to inspect the piece, Gaudet explained the concept and pointed out details, such as the ages of the victims, which are included with each name.
Shukrani Gray, librarian with the New Orleans Public Library’s African-American Resource Collection, congratulated Gaudet on the seductive bait-and-switch. “You know what I like about this?” she said. “When I first walked up, I said, ‘This is beautiful.’ Usually when people make something so serious, they make it dark.”
Other onlookers paused briefly.
“People are making the connection,” said Carolyn Harris, an investment consultant. “More people have to be aware of this sort of thing.”
Gaudet, a well-known figure in the New Orleans art scene for a quarter century, has produced a similar artwork annually for the past five years. The concept has been the same, though the individual symbols have changed. In 2015, he created replicas of tearful doll faces to represent the victims. In 2016, he produced small broken columns - a traditional cemetery symbol for life cut short. In 2017, he produced drops of blood, and last year, fallen leaves.
Gaudet pointed out that over the project’s history, the homicide count has dropped, to 119 last year from 174 in 2016, as reported by The Times-Picayune ’ The New Orleans Advocate . He said if he’s still creating his annual artistic homicide tallies in 10 years, he’d “like to arrange them in a row so you can see that the issue becomes more and more insignificant.”
Gaudet said the nature of this year’s “Murder Rate” took onlookers by surprise more than in past years. “Sometimes when I told people what it was, they were sort of shocked by it,” he said. “One guy made the sign of the cross.”
The grimmest detail of the piece is the target marked not with a name and a date but with the label “unborn child.”
“These were two innocent people,” Gaudet said, referring to the pregnant woman who was killed and the baby she was expecting, “but the unborn child is doubly, super tragic.”
Over the past few years, Gaudet has been transfixed by the plague of gun violence in New Orleans and the country as a whole. His 2018 gallery exhibit “Shooting Gallery” was a chilling reaction to the phenomenon of school shootings.
Perhaps unexpectedly, guns have long been part of the artist’s life.
Gaudet, 57, is a former Marine, former Army paratrooper and retired captain in the Army Reserve. He owns a shotgun. He said he’s not averse to firearms per se but is horrified by their misuse.
Gaudet said neither he nor anyone in his family has been a victim of violence. But he said he feels the phenomenon affects everyone. He said the mirror he used in this year’s sculpture was inspired by a viewer last year who emphatically pointed out that homicides are a societal problem, not confined to the slain and the killers. Gaudet said the looking glass was meant to symbolically place viewers in the midst of the problem.
“I find it all tragically interesting,” he said, “and artistically interesting. Maybe it’s a cathartic thing for me, making it and putting it out there.”
Tracking the number of homicides and the identities of victims is not as easy as it might seem, Gaudet said. He relies on the newspaper, the NOPD website and other sources for his information. This year, he said, was particularly tough, because a ransomware attack closed down the city’s computers, slowing his research. Several of the glass targets on his 2019 sculpture are unnamed because he’s not sure of the exact identities.
Gaudet said he doesn’t view his artwork as a protest, just an illustration. He has never asked for permission to display his annual sculpture at City Hall, but he has apparently been welcome to do so. Last year, he said, a representative of the mayor asked him to move the 2018 artwork slightly to make sure the steps were unimpeded. Then, he said, the representative assured him that she appreciated the artwork. This year, there was no official City Hall response.
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