‍In our Staff Spotlight series, we’re pulling back the curtain on the talented artists, artisans, and craftspeople who make up our crew. Our team is a gumbo pot of creativity: painters, sculptors, woodworkers, fiber artists, costume designers, metalsmiths, actors, musicians, writers, jewelry designers, and the list goes on. If you can dream it up, chances are we’re already doing it in our free time, too. That’s what makes us so good at our day jobs as custom experiential fabricators.

Each month, we’ll shine a light on one of our team members—their inspirations, their after-hours projects, and the creative spark they bring to both their life and our shop floor. Because behind every masterpiece is a person with a story worth sharing.

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This month, we’re talking to our CNC Programmer, Maggie Berlin Ducote, producer, research partner, fabricator, and (this time of year) Mardi Gras Monster.

What do people call you?

‍Maggie, Marjorie if you’re cute

How long have you been an artist, and how’d you get started? 

I received my BFA from Tulane in photography and literature a little over a decade ago. I was a very ambitious, heady artist but, like most, deeply struggled with ego and with the nature of the industry and what it practically meant to be an artist. Product and Consumption. Those things disturbed my making and paralyzed personal practice for me. I couldn’t reconcile them at the time. So I immediately pivoted to arts programming and production. I want everything from life, and working with and in the worlds of others immediately engaged this desire. Thus began a journey of collaborative practice. In doing so, I found a way in from the side—and through many tricks—to approach my own sense of practice. 

Tell us about your work.

Post graduation, I got connected with Pelican Bomb (an online arts-critical writing platform of yore, iykyk). I was young, and it was a compelling time in the arts community. I supported their Community Supported Arts (CSA) program and opened their physical space, Gallery X. Our first show exhibited the art duo Momma Tried (Theo Eliezer and Micah Learned), and subsequently I consulted on Issue 3 of their eponymous conceptual “nudie” art magazine.

This work with Pelican Bomb led me to managing the Percent for Art program for the city with Arts New Orleans, a program holding a 40-year collection of 300+ artworks and sculptures. My inventory and conservation runs brought me to the highly visible and also forgotten corners of the metropolitan area, engaging and supporting our public infrastructure from a placemaking and public health perspective. Some of these artworks were lost or in situ in abandoned public space, still steeped in implications from Katrina. I strategized renewed vigor in the program, new artwork purchases from our communities, and more art in public space.

With Arts New Orleans, I also crafted and launched their SALON Artist Residency in Canal Place (now closed). This was an excitingly new type of project for the city, offering empty store fronts—space delegated for a specific purpose (consumerism) that is often antithetical to the artist position or is used as a thematic medium by artists—as free studios and exhibition space. It became a place for experimentation, dialogue, critique, and connection. Our cohorts included artists such as Milagros Collective, Young Maasai Hunters, Ashley Teamer and Marta Rodriguez Maleck, and Dave Greber, to name a few. Milagros Collective was chosen by New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival to do an exhibition after encountering the duo at SALON, the kind of direct impact I love to see.

Soon I connected with Orlando Maaike Gouwenberg and Joris Lindhout and their Deltaworkers international artist residency program. Managing and working with the artists of Deltaworkers was a formative experience for me, and it blew open the microcosm of my little Southern world. The methodology of the residency was alternative, research based, and nomadic. We provided no studios, expected no body of work at the end, and instead pursued immersion and lived experience, direct connections, and journeying. Every artist I worked with became a partner, and this is the foundation of what I now consider a practice (if I were to label what I do).

One of the first and favorite shows we did with DW was an exhibition called The Colour Out of Space, presented at the former location of Parse gallery in the CBD. We always did a side program to the residency, bringing international art and artists to New Orleans to be presented alongside and in conversation with local artists of the city and the region. This is indicative of the core values of Deltaworkers that I have since adopted in my personal practice with artists. Work collaboratively, share knowledge and resources, bring in, go out, see for yourself.

Post-Deltaworkers and deep in the pandemic, there were no shows, no residencies, and no work. I was unmoored and looking for anchorage. I took welding courses out in Westwego, LA, and got certified. Then I found another side quest running Locations in the film industry. After the strikes and the fall of film, my journey found a home in metal fabrication-turned-CNC at Downtown FabWorks. When I’m not operating CNC, I work independently with artists as a research partner and producer on their projects. My current independent work is with Canadian artist Tanya Busse’s Chimera project, ongoing. 

What’s your favorite thing that you’ve ever made, and what makes it special?

I’ve not “made” much (outside of Mardi Gras) and self promotion is unnatural for me. But there’s this one drawing I made some years ago that I look at often. It’s super soft. At the time, I was playing with evoking extreme lightness and extreme darkness in mediums. The piece is very light; even though it is all filled with the pencil, it appears in areas to be vacant. The composition is a table, straight on, settled in the voided but full space, and there’s a glass of spilled milk off the center. The stream of milk languidly curls over the edge and slowly drips. It is only special in its reminder. When I look at it, I remember “Nothing to be done about it now.”

I will also note this last event I produced for Tanya’s project. Her work involves dreams, deep time, hydrology of the region, Acadian displacement, merging, and linguistics. We did a dream workshop for folks of Acadian and Creole descent & community. It ended up being 10 femmes from the Gulf South region, and for over three hours, we delved into our dreams with dreamworker Kezia Vida. It was a profound coming together for the participants who connected over their layered ancestral body and dreaming world. 

What do you enjoy most about your artistic journey?

I’ve probably made it clear that the artistic journey is fraught for me. My journey nonetheless has evolved away from these myopic doubts and looping effacements. Working collaboratively, melded mind, showed me how. After all, I am a visual and experiential learner. And every artist that has taken my hand, trusted me, graced me with their journey has helped me on the pursuit of my own. Now as I enter deeper into my 30s and my brain seems to have finally fully formed, I am renewed with curiosity and speculation into my own making.

I say often and not always with pride that my life is built upon side quests. I think when you live and grow in a meandering way it is easy to judge yourself against those that find a clear path. That will never be me. I am often bewildered at the places I find myself. How the steps and choices I’ve made, however disparate, find harmony in their amalgamation. I have travelled the world, met people who are experts in their fields and niche environments, and nurtured a robust network of friends and colleagues. And I am gifted knowledge and vision at every step, every new meeting.

If you have a query or need, it’s likely I know who you need to talk to or where you need to go. If not, I will vehemently find out. That is so fulfilling to me, knowing the thousand answers to the question, or the thousand questions to the answer. Now here at DFW, I find myself in fabrication, looped back to the doing that caused me so much angst as a young artist, finding confidence and form in my hands—and thus, engaging the many ways of answering the question of design, the thousand doings. The answer to the head that knows is the hand that knows. And my constellation keeps expanding.

What are you looking forward to making next? 

I would love to start experimenting in making fountains. I think the way they are utilized to evoke romance, privilege, formal vs wild space, sensory landscape, the Garden, or our primordial origins, out of the grotto, from the sea, is super interesting. Water works. And also sound, I’d like to get more involved with my hodgepodge kit and explore sound work. I have this beautiful ARP Odyssey still in its box gathering dust. If I could only find an affordable studio ‘round these parts…

Do you have a favorite artist or personal hero who influences your work? 

I try to avoid questions of favorites because everything lives in a soup in my brain, but I come to Ambera Wellmann’s paintings often, Cécile B. Evans, and I adore Laure Provoust and Madison Bycroft’s works. I had already been fangirling Laure’s work for some years, and over this last summer I had the pleasure of meeting and spending time with her at the Folkestone Triennial in the UK. I love Southern Gothic literature (Harry Crews especially), Walter Benjamin, the New Narrative writers, and the fabulist and speculative fiction of Italo Calvino. Robbie Basho and Alice Coltrane will play in my afterlife.

Also all of my brilliant, endless friends that make Mardi Gras, and spawn parties, and build worlds here and beyond.

Do you feel like the creative work you do IRL influences how you approach your projects when you’re at work?

I think my wandering path in life has crafted a dynamic and curious way of approaching challenges, systems, and making. I can recognize patterns quickly and see weaknesses and solutions miles ahead. When I work with artists, my craft is understanding their vision before perhaps they even see it. To see what it needs, and what it doesn’t. We get so bogged down with what we own personally that having a partner that can see in and outside of you propels a project or piece toward actualization and success. This is what I carry with me in my work at DFW.

Do you have any upcoming projects or happenings that you’d like people to know about?

I krewe a bit for Mardi Gras. Find me with our French revolutionary karaoke krewe, Les Sans Culottes, during Krewe Bohème and flagging for Monsters. No humans allowed.

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Looking for the right partner to bring your creative vision to life?

If you’re seeking a team that blends deep trade skills with artistic sensitivity—one that understands quality, storytelling, and the emotional weight of well-built spaces—we’re ready. From concept to installation, we collaborate with creators to build environments that move people and matter. Let’s make something that resonates.

Contact us to get started.