Mitchell Gaudet headlines hot glass demo and brass band fundraiser in New Orleans

New Orleans based glass artist Mitchell Gaudet. photo courtesy: yaya creative glass and arts new orleans.

YAYA Creative Glass is hosting a benefit concert that will be a mixture of native New Orleans jazz in combination with hot glass demonstration. The benefit concert appropriately titled “Brass and Glass” will be held on Saturday, March 24 at the YAYA glass studio in New Orleans and will include performances by traditional New Orleans marching brass bands and hot glass demonstrations by New Orleans-native Mitchell Gaudet.

YAYA Creative Glass—New Orleans’ only public-access hot shop with a glass studio and art gallery, provides support and artistic training for New Orleans’ creative young people. The organization is part of a “young aspirations, young artists” philosophy dedicated to bringing arts education to inner city youth. Gaudet, a YAYA board member, is a local glass artist born and raised in New Orleans. He owns Studio Inferno, a glass studio based out of the the Bywater Neighborhood in New Orleans—a place which has had a substantial influence on much of his work.

Gaudet’s roots and life in New Orleans have inspired much of his work including a piece about the line that stained his city, where the water settled for weeks after Hurricane Katrina. He also created “Ninth Ward Wreckage,” a glass sculpture representing houses piled up in the neighborhood so disastrously effected by the hurricane. As Gaudet says in his artist statement, “My artwork is influenced by history, found objects and the need to make ‘objects of desire.’ New Orleans and its culture have a place in everything I have made and will continue to make.” During the live demonstration at the glass studio, Gaudet will hot cast an original work that will be up for auction at the event of which the proceeds will benefit YAYA.

Musical band performances by traditional New Orleans marching brass bands Treme Brass Band and Hot 8 Brass Band will also take place at the event. Performances were made possible by the Jazz Foundation of America—a national organization for the support of elder jazz and blues musicians in crisis.

—Suzann Caputo