With all the jagged-edged metal sculptures scattered around the grounds of Circa 1857—and inside Circa 1857—and popping up in parks around Baton Rouge, one can imagine the artist behind them is pretty prolific.
He’d also seem wildly eccentric if his game plan weren’t so admirable.
Joseph “JoJo” Jilbert, a transplant from New Orleans and currently the artist-in-residence at Circa, uses found scrap metal objects to create massive sculptures of warriors, seahorses, dinosaurs (one rightfully dubbed “Scraptor”), and more that often tower over the viewer.
And he’s starting to enlist Baton Rouge youth in the creation process. Across the street from Circa, in the lobby of Dufrocq Elementary, stands a sculpture of a robot Jilbert assembled from objects the students collected. It is part of his “Art and Seek” project.
At the end of the last school year, he gave a presentation to the Dufrocq students, showing them scraps of metal and rusty nails he uses to build his works. Then he told them, “’OK, now you’re all going to help me clean up Mother Earth one little sculpture at a time.’”
He had met with school officials in 2012, learning that most of their arts funding had been dropped. His idea was to create a sculpture with the students’ help that they could then raffle off for around $10 a ticket. The pool of money would be split between Dufrocq’s arts and music programs. Jilbert wouldn’t get a penny.
“Some lucky person is going to get this piece for $10. That’s not bad,” he says. “Hopefully Dufrocq is going to get 20 or 30,000 dollars for it. I don’t mind doing that, who else is [caring about these programs]?”
For this particular piece, the students brought in old faucet fixtures, wheels from a cart, metal lawn art, and even springs from a trampoline—all of them—to create what he dubbed a female robot golfer.
“They are not only being part of the sculpture, it’s something they’ll remember for the rest of their life,” Jilbert says. “They can come back and say, ‘Look at my five pieces or seven pieces in there.’ Their memories are in there.”
The piece is being presented at the Dufrocq PTO meeting later this month, and the raffle will continue until the school’s third annual Dinner and a Movie fundraiser event in December.
Emily Lopez, a PTO mom at Dufrocq, has been helping Jilbert organize the project and find other schools in the area interested in working with him—McKinley Middle Magnet is already on board. She says just putting Jilbert in front of the students and parents is enough to get them excited. His exuberant personality and love of creating art is infectious.
“Only JoJo can do what he does,” Lopez says.
Local leaders are noticing, too. Jilbert has sculptures at the Convention Street Park downtown, and he is working with BREC on commissions for other parks, such as City Park and the Perkins Road Community Park. The Shaw Center for the Arts and North Boulevard Town Square have also been discussed as locations for new works.
Jilbert wants to see Art and Seek become a statewide endeavor, helping to save and improve art programs that have often been on the chopping block. And with how easily he seems to churn out massive sculptures, the task of taking the found metal scraps of many more students and turning it all into new and imaginative works may not be too difficult for the productive artist.
“I never draw anything up, I don’t plan it. It tells me what it wants to become,” he says of his process. “Hopefully it will catch on everywhere like wildfire.”
Find out more about JoJo Jilbert and his work at his Facebook page.
Pictured right: One of JoJo Jilbert’s sculptures on display at the Convention Street Park downtown.
