Internationally recognized glass artist Mitchell Gaudet’s work is steeped in regional history and imagery. He earned a B.F.A. from Louisiana State University in 1984 and an M.F.A. from Tulane University in 1990, the year before he founded the New Orleans School of Glassworks. Since 1992, Gaudet has owned and operated Studio Inferno. Gaudet’s work has addressed the emotional tumult of a city and state under siege from man-made and natural disasters. His reaction to Hurricane Katrina was Message of Remembrances, a site-specific work installed in 2010 at the entrance to an exhibition about the storm at the Louisiana State Museum’s Presbytere. That same year, in response to the Deepwater Horizon Gulf oil spill, Gaudet created Deepwater Horizon Response, an array of fifty-three 100-gallon oil barrels painted flat black and installed at the Longue Vue House and Gardens in New Orleans.