After the last parade rolls down St. Charles Avenue on Fat Tuesday, and before the sanitation crews and mechanized street sweepers begin the massive job of clearing the detritus of the festivities, New Orleans artist John Lawson swings into action—scrounging the street and neutral ground, as the grassy medians that divide the city’s avenues are known, for beads and trinkets. In video footage shot by his girlfriend, Elizabeth Morgan, the night of Fat Tuesday 1999, he could almost be mistaken for one of the Orleans Parish prison inmates who volunteer for Mardi Gras cleanup duty. He's dressed drably in heavy clothes, with a wool cap pulled down over his face and double-lined Hefty garbage bags tucked into his belt. Commenting on the video, Lawson says he likes to remain "as inconspicuous as possible." “It’s kind of eerie that time of night,” he points out, noting the presence of a small horde of people hell-bent on “scavenging” for recyclable containers and “throws”—beads and other items tossed by masked riders on parade floats—as well as furniture and picnic accessories abandoned by parade-goers.

John Lawson in his studio at Audubon Hotel His intricate, visually intoxicating tableaux testify to the potential of an indigenous resource--Mardi Gras beads--as an artistic medium.

Lawson, who spends hours methodically filling his bags with booty, likens himself to “a hound” and says, “It reminds me of raking blueberries in Maine.”

He certainly reaped a bountiful harvest in 1999: five bags full of throws, mostly beaded necklaces. Indeed, what many people would regard as junk is, for him, a “natural resource”—and a compelling artistic medium. He uses Mardi Gras beads to bedeck all manner of objects—pianos, bongo drums, shoes, bones, mannequins, skulls, even antique bathroom scales—with intricate, visually intoxicating tableaux.

the Audubon Hotel's bar top. The imagery is as detailed as it is varied. Mixed in with aquatic scenes and various motifs inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s otherworldy triptych Garden of Delights, is Lawson’s depiction of a female drag queen named Myra (along with other colorful, real-world denizens of the Audubon’s notoriously randy bar scene) and a yellow Teletubby—Lah Lah, from the cult children’s TV show. Measuring 54 feet in length, the panels, which took Lawson three-and-a-half months to complete, are covered with clear polyurethane resin.

Lawson, 38, is by no means the first artist to discover the aesthetic potential of Mardi Gras beads. Back in the early 1980s, Jesselyn Zurik, an established New Orleans artist best known for wood sculptures, covered a 1974 Gremlin, to arresting effect, with Mardi Gras beads (it's now on display at the Mardi Gras Museum in Kenner, La.). She also beaded elaborate, swirling patterns on flat wooden panels cut in the shapes of dresses. And for as long as there have been Mardi Gras beads, crafty types have used them to embellish costumes, votive alters and all manner of decorative objects.

Still, it’s a safe bet that no one has developed the medium as fully as Lawson. Says he, “I’ve got the expertise of manipulating the bead to the point where if I have an image in mind, I can now translate it comfortably.”  

A native of Birmingham, England, Lawson says his infatuation with beads began with a “big hallucinogenic Mardi Gras trip” in 1984, when he was an undergraduate studying landscape architecture at Louisiana State University, in Baton Rouge. He and a group of friends hit the Big Easy the weekend before Fat Tuesday. They didn’t have a place to stay, so the plan was to return to Baton Rouge after one night of music and revelry. But when it came time to drive back, Lawson, along with a cohort, decided to part company with the rest of the crew. The duo proceeded to embark on a party marathon, staying up for five days without a wink of sleep—hanging out in bars and carousing the French Quarter. (next page)