This Indiana City Spent $2.4 Million on Creepy Bronze People

Walk through downtown Carmel, Indiana and you’ll spot them everywhere. Life-size bronze people reading newspapers, helping kids ride bikes, and playing instruments on street corners. They look so real you might actually say “excuse me” before realizing you’re apologizing to a statue. But these aren’t your average public art installations, and the city’s massive investment in them has sparked one of the weirdest debates in small-town America.

• Carmel has purchased 23 hyper-realistic bronze sculptures by artist J. Seward Johnson over 19 years, spending $2.4 million in taxpayer money on what many call “creepy” art.
• The statues are so lifelike that people regularly do double-takes, apologize to them, or try to start conversations before realizing they’re talking to bronze.
• Art critics have called Johnson’s work “chocolate-box rubbish,” “the worst sort of kitsch,” and “the worst museum exhibition I’ve ever seen,” but regular people can’t stop taking selfies with them.

A Town Full of Bronze Time Travelers

Carmel’s obsession with these statues started back in 2005 when they installed “First Ride,” showing a father teaching his daughter to ride a bike. Former Mayor Jim Brainard became completely hooked on artist Seward Johnson’s work and decided Carmel, In, needed more. Way more. Fast forward to 2024, and the city just unveiled its 23rd and final Johnson purchase, making Carmel home to the biggest collection of these things outside New Jersey.

Here’s what makes them so unsettling: they’re painted bronze castings of actual people, frozen mid-action like someone hit pause on a 1970s home movie. A woman sits reading poetry on a bench. A policeman appears to be directing traffic. Jazz musicians play a silent concert. They’re detailed down to the wrinkles in someone’s corduroy pants and the exact fold of a newspaper from 1982.

Walk past one and you’ll probably do a double-take. Some people wave at them. Others try to start conversations before their brain catches up and reminds them they’re talking to metal. Kids poke them to make sure they’re not real. Tourists absolutely love them, which is either a testament to their realism or proof that people will take selfies with literally anything.

And they weren’t cheap. Individual pieces cost anywhere from $70,000 to $430,000. The jazz musician set featuring Louis Armstrong, Gene Krupa, and four other legends? That ran the city $430,000 just to add three more musicians to the band. For context, that’s about what a nice house costs in many American cities. Except you get a house, and Carmel got three bronze guys playing invisible instruments.

Art Critics Have Entered the Chat

If you’re wondering whether these statues are considered “good art,” boy do critics have opinions. Blake Gopnik at The Washington Post reviewed a 2003 Johnson exhibition and didn’t hold back: “really, really bad” and “the worst museum exhibition I’ve ever seen.” Time magazine’s Robert Hughes went with “chocolate-box rubbish.” Another prominent curator called them “the worst sort of kitsch.”

That word “kitsch” gets thrown around a lot with Johnson’s work. It’s art world speak for things that are tacky, overly sentimental, or designed for mass appeal rather than pushing boundaries. Think velvet Elvis paintings or those big-eyed kid portraits from the 1960s. When Carmel’s own Public Art Advisory Committee reviewed yet another Johnson piece in 2023, they voted 7-1 against buying it, calling his work “uninspiring kitsch art” and stating that “Carmel can do better.”

But here’s the twist nobody saw coming: regular people absolutely eat this stuff up. Johnson’s exhibitions draw massive crowds. People line up to sit next to the statues, wrap their arms around bronze shoulders, and snap hundreds of photos. Kids climb on them. Couples pose with them for anniversary pictures. One of Johnson’s pieces, “Double Check,” survived 9/11 covered in ash near Ground Zero and became an impromptu memorial that thousands visited.

So you’ve got this weird split where art critics are writing scathing reviews and the general public is having the time of their lives. Johnson himself seemed pretty amused by the whole thing, basically shrugging at the “kitsch” label like someone who knows his work is in airports and town squares worldwide while the critics’ favorite artists are in storage.

The Uncanny Valley Comes to Indiana

There’s a term in robotics and animation called “the uncanny valley.” It’s that creepy feeling you get when something looks almost human but not quite right. These statues live right in that valley and have set up permanent residence.

People report all kinds of weird reactions to them. Some swear they’ve seen the statues move out of the corner of their eye. Others say it feels like the bronze figures are watching them. One Reddit thread about Carmel’s collection is full of stories about people jumping because they thought a statue was a real person, or conversely, almost sitting on what they thought was a statue but was actually a real person sitting very still.

Johnson cast these sculptures from living models, which explains the almost disturbing level of realism. Every detail is there: the texture of denim, the exact way hair falls, the realistic proportions of hands holding newspapers. They’re like someone took actual people from 1975 and dipped them in bronze paint. If you saw one in your peripheral vision at dusk, you’d probably assume it was your neighbor taking out the trash.

Scattered throughout downtown Carmel, they create this bizarre alternate reality where frozen bronze people from the disco era share sidewalks with actual living humans going about their 2020s lives. It’s like walking through a museum where the exhibits escaped their pedestals and wandered into traffic.

The Price of Bronze Nostalgia

Johnson came from money. Like, serious money. His grandfather co-founded Johnson & Johnson, which meant he could afford to build his own 42-acre sculpture park in New Jersey and run a massive foundry. Some of his bigger works were cast in China to save costs, which is a sentence that sounds weird when you’re talking about multi-thousand-pound bronze statues.

Here’s the thing about Carmel’s collection: they went all in on one artist. Between 2005 and the early 2020s, 45% of the entire public art budget went to Johnson sculptures. That’s $2.4 million for 23 pieces from the same guy doing the same hyper-realistic style. For comparison, that money could have bought 48 decent cars, funded a small community center, or apparently, a whole bunch of bronze people stuck in the 1970s.

Are the sculptures bad? Not really. They’re incredibly detailed and technically impressive. You can see the individual threads in someone’s sweater and the exact wrinkles in their newspaper. But $430,000 for three jazz musicians? That’s the kind of number that makes taxpayers start asking questions at city council meetings.

Johnson died in 2020, which means no more sculptures will ever be made. What Carmel has now is basically a complete set of collectible bronze time capsules. Whether that’s a good investment or an expensive case of small-town FOMO depends entirely on who you ask.

Living With Your Bronze Neighbors

Carmel elected a new mayor, and word on the street is the statue shopping spree is officially over. With all 23 pieces now in place, residents have to figure out how to live with their permanent bronze neighbors who are forever stuck doing 1970s things in public spaces.

Public art debates are always messy because taste is subjective. Some people genuinely love these sculptures and think they add character to downtown. Others find them unsettling, like walking through a wax museum that got left outside. Plenty of visitors think they’re fun and quirky. Art critics think they’re terrible and say so in publications nobody reads.

What makes Carmel’s situation unique is the commitment. This wasn’t one or two controversial pieces. The city went full send on 23 bronze time travelers from the disco era and spent enough money to make headlines. Bronze lasts basically forever, so these statues will probably still be here confusing people in 2124.

You’ve got to hand it to Carmel though. They picked a lane and stayed in it. Most towns would hedge their bets with different artists and styles. Carmel said “we like hyper-realistic bronze people from 50 years ago” and backed it up with $2.4 million. That’s either conviction or the most expensive case of buyer’s remorse in Indiana history.