The Talented Artists Who Create the Fanciful Floats of the Carnival Season
At Cantrell Studios in Kenner, René Pierre ascends a ladder to put the finishing touches on an 8-foot teapot. Behind him looms a 10-foot chef who grins as he grips a dough roller the width of a great blue heron’s wingspan. To the chef’s left rises a colossal bottle of Crystal hot sauce, and beyond, scattered across the 12,800-square-foot warehouse, perch dozens of other props. Some sit atop floats. Others await their ride. Here, a papier-mâché King Kong preens next to a fiberglass jester. There, a green witch snarls near a trampoline-sized plate of beignets.
Step into any Mardi Gras warehouse, or den, and enter a Carnival dreamworld. While the oversized tableaux of a parade rolling through city streets can spark an Alice in Wonderland effect, props and floats loom even larger in spaces such as this, where Pierre and other artists bring them to life. Their shared goal: to make Carnival a reality for the estimated 1.4 million annual visitors who attend parades in New Orleans alone.
“We want to show the world,” Pierre says, smiling as he inspects the teapot opening, now vibrant yellow. He then provides a list of the “we” he has in mind, all the carpenters, electricians, welders, costume designers, sculptors and painters, those “unsung heroes who spill their blood,” as Pierre says, and work year-round to make Carnival happen. These artists preserve a tradition that has thrived in Louisiana since the Krewe of Comus first rolled in 1857. Their work presents an annual opportunity to witness one of the world’s preeminent unticketed spectacles.
Manuel Ponce and René Pierre still work with pen and ink to design Mardi Gras floats. Pictured here are Ponce’s rough concept and finished drawings for this year’s Krewe of Orpheus and, below, Pierre’s design for the inaugural Mystic Krewe of Nyx.
On the calendar, it occupies the days between Twelfth Night and Mardi Gras Day. For the artists, it’s perennial, a lifeblood. Pierre began work as a professional Mardi Gras artist 40 years ago. His passion for this world began in elementary school, when he started making miniature Mardi Gras floats out of shoeboxes. At age eight, he entered a competition and won. Then he designed and built more miniatures. He entered other competitions.
“I would always win,” Pierre says, as joyous at the memory as he is when examining his most recent work inside the den. After graduating from high school, Pierre began exhibiting his miniatures at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. Soon after, Kern Studios started selling them. Today, nearly 50 years after his first competition, Pierre’s fingerprints are present at every stage of the Mardi Gras process. He continues to make miniature floats. He also builds and designs the big ones.
As many as five years in advance, a Mardi Gras krewe will send its upcoming theme to artists such as Pierre and Manuel Ponce, an artist at Kern Studios who designs floats for Bacchus, Cleopatra, Hermes and Orpheus. After receiving the theme, Pierre and Ponce get to work the old-fashioned way, with ink and paper. They submit those drawings to the krewe. Once approved, other artists begin the long process of building, sculpting and painting.
Like Pierre, Ponce balances design work with other roles. He started at Kern Studios before the 1984 World’s Fair. Now, almost everything he creates revolves around Mardi Gras. Besides designing floats for parades in New Orleans, San Antonio and at Universal Studios Florida, Ponce also produces artwork for doubloons, medallion doubloons and Mardi Gras cups. “I took so much for granted because I grew up with this,” he says. “Now, it comes naturally.”
When Pierre isn’t designing floats, he’s painting props. When he isn’t painting props, he’s building floats or making miniatures. Walking through Cantrell Studios, he notes which artist designed which prop, and who painted what. “Everyone deserves their credit,” he says. In one warehouse corner, he finds Mike Rohli, a Mardi Gras artist with 35 years of experience. Setting down a can of paint, Rohli says, “All these floats are like a big coloring book.”
Pierre puts the final touches on a prop at Cantrell Studios.
Pierre approaches one of them, now finished and awaiting its position in the parade. “It’s not Volkswagen,” he says. “It’s Rolls Royce.”
Fifteen miles away, on a quiet street in Gentilly, Ínez Pierre sits in the office of Pierre Parade Productions. “I’m going to tell you the truth,” she says. “I always hated Mardi Gras.” As a child, she had no choice. Parades peppered the Gentilly landscape. They were also her grandmother’s obsession. Once Ínez attained teenage freedom, she made a decision: No more.
Then one day in 1986 while studying at Delgado Community College, everything changed. “I met Mr. Mardi Gras,” she says. “René Pierre. I heard God’s voice say, ‘That’s gonna be your husband.’ She also heard René’s footsteps. “He pursued and pursued and pursued.” René’s enthusiasm for all things Mardi Gras eventually won Ínez over. He enlisted her help to build his miniatures. The couple married. One day, René said, “I’m going to build you a float so you can start your own business.”
In 2018, they started Pierre Parade Productions, the only Black-owned float-building and float rental company in New Orleans. Business thrived. Ínez’s ambitions grew. The floats she offered became more and more ornate. She developed a mantra: “Change the face of Mardi Gras.”
Cantrell Studios serves as a vendor where artists finish work begun in other Mardi Gras dens.
Then came the global pandemic. In November 2021, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell cancelled the city’s public parades. The Pierres worried their business would evaporate. On television one day, they saw Megan Boudreaux discuss her plans to start the Krewe of House Floats. Painting and decorating houses, Boudreaux explained, would provide a safe way to bring Carnival to the city during the pandemic. Watching Boudreaux speak, René recalled childhood memories of throwing beads off his front porch, pretending it was Mardi Gras Day. By then, Ínez had known him long enough to decipher his thoughts. “Rather than have the parade come to you, you go to it,” she said. René got to work. In less than three months, he designed, built and painted 64 porch floats. At night, he would return home to Ínez. Massaging his hands, she freed his locked fingers one by one.
Today, Ínez looks back at the grueling work during the pandemic as a period that solidified her desire to continue a life she never imagined before she met René. “Some people are geniuses in their fields,” she says. “René can tell you the schedule for the 1965 parades. He can tell you who painted the floats of any given year and who designed them, who was the first to do this and that. And I have to tell him, ‘But you can’t remember to put down the toilet seat?’”
Ínez Pierre is owner of Pierre Parade Productions, the only Black-owned float-building company in New Orleans.
On Claiborne Avenue in New Orleans at the Rex Den, Baton Rouge native Caroline Thomas walks past a display of her 2025 float designs. Thomas has worked full-time for the float production company Royal Artists since 2012. Here, she designs floats for Proteus and Rex, the last of the 19th century Mardi Gras parades.
Like René Pierre, Thomas’ artistic passion and purpose unfolds in a warehouse world of floats and gargantuan props. As a student at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, she strove for a career as a fine arts painter. Then she became curious about international Carnival art. After developing a particular interest in the costumes of the Emmy Award-winning Trinidadian artist Peter Minshall, she longed to see this work as a member of his intended audience: on the streets during Carnival. Thomas soon found herself in a taxi in Port of Spain. Without prompting, the driver pontificated about the social and cultural importance of Minshall’s work. “That blew my socks off,” Thomas says. Creating parade and street art, she realized, could be just as valid a way to tell stories as exhibiting in museums and galleries. “You could make this your life’s work,” she told herself. “This can be a form of self-expression that brings people to the streets.”
Caroline Thomas’ drawings from the Krewe of Proteus line the board inside an Uptown New Orleans Mardi Gras den in the same order that they paraded on Lundi Gras 2023.
In Trinidad, Thomas found her inspiration. In Louisiana, she had already developed deep roots for the tradition of Carnival art. “There’s a visual language that everyone who grew up here understands,” she says. “It’s not just some superfluous party, but something with grand ambitious narratives and deep spiritual meaning.” Continuing through the Rex Den, she passes artists and carpenters going about their work. “Nobody gets trained as a Mardi Gras artist,” she says. “They come from everywhere: tattoo artists, graffiti artists, mural artists, fine artists.” About half have training in the fine arts. Less than three miles from the Rex Den, one of them circles a grimacing 8-foot pirate.
Benny Anderson graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2022 and is now in his second full year as a Mardi Gras artist. From the pirate, he turns to consult a clipboard that contains anatomical sketches, renderings of pirates, and a photograph of a woman exaggerating an angry expression. “I pulled this from the Internet to remind me what a mean pirate looks like,” he says, tapping his finger against the woman’s forehead. The clipboard rests on a table near the pirate, and Anderson rips off a thin strip of corrugated cardboard to demonstrate how he shapes such a sculpture. He brushes it with contact glue and then molds the cardboard in his hands. “This is how you mold it over the wooden armature,” he says. To that shape, he adds a layer of butcher paper. Next comes a layer of papier-mâché. The final step involves brushing the sculpture with white waterproofing paint. After a sculptor gets to this stage, painters such as René Pierre or Caroline Thomas will take over. “My job,” Anderson says, “is to create as much depth and detail as I can so that they have more definition to work with.”
In 2023, Benny Anderson constructed this prop as a 1980s roller derby figure. For this year’s parade, Anderson repurposed the prop and turned it into a pirate.
When they can, Pierre, Thomas and Anderson repurpose props. Last year, for instance, Anderson’s pirate paraded as a 1980s roller derby girl. He steps back to observe the transformation. “I gave her a big 80s hairdo and roller skates. Now look at her.” To start from scratch, Anderson typically needs two weeks to complete a prop. Repurposing props cuts that time in half, something he appreciates since, like many Mardi Gras artists, he doesn’t get paid until he finishes a project. Those projects commence when Thomas sends him a picture of her drawings. Those drawings begin after a krewe sends her its theme. Those themes continue a cultural conversation that explorers Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville and Bienville started when they disembarked near the mouth of the Mississippi River on Mardi Gras day, 1699, and planted the seed of Carnival in the New World.
To put it all in perspective, to provide proper justice, you would have to include everyone, all those carpenters building floats that will sit atop 19th-century chassis, each of the artists who works at home and bedazzles T-shirts and coconuts and high-heeled shoes. You would have to track the year-round work of all the krewes who gather on weekends to sew and bead their costumes and everyone else who dreams Carnival into life. They toil behind closed doors, many of them inside warehouses that hum with industrial fans or pop tunes escaping tinny speakers or the raucous symphony of a Louisiana downpour. But above that noise thrums an aura of anticipation. One day, these floats and props will exit the warehouse, and artists like Benny Anderson will be on the streets, masked and costumed, awaiting their arrival.
Circling his pirate one more time to check if he’s missed a spot, Anderson smiles. In his eyes, there’s a glimmer of excitement. “I just get happy seeing it,” he says.
