Centre Street Building, Level 1
Stephanie Mercedes’ We Were Treated Like Numbers Rather Than Stars is made of hundreds of .50 BMG bullet casings and 25 mm shells. The casings and shells were used in the U.S. Army’s heavy machine guns and war tanks and were annealed and hammered by the artist into soundless bells.
The large-scale metalwork sculpture commissioned by the Walters Art Museum and suspended in the atrium of its Centre Street building is the first artwork visitors encounter upon entering the museum and the first art object to be installed in the space. As viewers move through the installation, different spiral forms come in and out of focus—as viewers’ perspectives shift, so does their experience of the work.
Today, the pervasive reality of gun violence forces us to confront daily war at home. The installation reflects on the spiral-like nature of trauma, grief, and emancipation. Mercedes’ work explores themes of transformation and hope, evoking the artist’s interest in transforming objects or materials with negative associations into something positive.
The artist did not invent the method of transforming bullet casings into art. Trench art—the practice of soldiers creating works of art from spent bullet casings while in the trenches—is a longstanding tradition in metalworking. Mercedes tapped into that tradition while creating this piece.