Dawn DeDeaux and Dickie Landry Collaborative Performance 2021
Dawn DeDeaux HOME on Island Road, Pointe Aux Chenes LA / End of the Road Project
Dawn DeDeaux / MotherShip III: The Station
New York Times, Photo by Paul Costello
Dawn DeDeaux / Visiting Artist Poster
UNC, Princeton, Holly Cross College
DeDeaux 511 Marigny Studio / Working on Performance Interpretation of Kafka's "THE HUNGER ARTIST"
Dawn DeDeaux and Dickie Landry Performance Poster 2021
DeDeaux 511 Marigny Studio / Working on Landscape pieces for ALDRICH MUSEUM / "Landscape Reclaimed"
Dawn DeDeaux / Camp Abundance Studio / 2016
BIO PHOTO ARCHIVE SELECTIONS
DeDeaux Filming / Directing WOMAN EATING PORKCHOP
Mark Bingham Sound Studio
Dawn DeDeaux & Big Freedia / O'Fortuna Bounce Opera / Photo by Scott Simmons, 2012
Dawn DeDeaux Filming St. Augustine
Marching Band Lead Drummer / Drummer Boy 1994
Dawn DeDeaux / Prospect 3 Gala Honoree / Photo by Linda Yablonsky, 2014
DeDeaux 511 Marigny Studio / America House Doors, Talking Kinghts, Fence Knight male model Mac Taylor, Hunger Artist - Set Chair and Scale, Face of God Bed Frame in view
Dawn DeDeaux / Lecture "Beyond Disaster" / College of the Holy Cross / Photograph by Pamela Bishop 2015
Dawn DeDeaux / MotherShip III: The Station 2014
DeDeaux 511 Marigny Studio / Working on High Box Work / "Anthropology Series"
Dawn DeDeaux INTRODUCTION
DeDeaux has merged art with new technologies for decades to broaden definitions of art and audience. Early works from the 1970s such as CB Radio Booths harnessed the mobility and fluidity of language and location — utilizing mass communication media as the medium itself to bring art into the streets, connecting underserved communities to the currents of cultural discourse. Mid-career works offered pioneering immersive, synchronized media environments and video sculptures — including Soul Shadows, Women Eating, Almost Touching You, and The Face of God, In Search of - a six channel 360 degree environment that premiered at the 1996 Olympics.
Through the past two decades DeDeaux’s work has moved between social and environmental justice, presented both as digital 2D work, sculptures and electronic theater to address ecological threat and extinctions - including Project Mutants, The Goddess Fortuna and her long-running MotherShip Series. Selections from MotherShip were featured in a two year exhibition at MassMoCA titled Thumbs Up for the MotherShip where she was paired with artist and musician Lonnie Holley with whom she continues to collaborate.
DeDeaux has exhibited at numerous institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Armand Hammer Museum, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, The Contemporary / Baltimore, Seattle Museum of Contemporary Art, Canadian Film Society of Toronto, Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology, Houston, Ballroom Marfa, Texas and a recent 50 year career retrospective at New Orleans Museum of Art.
DeDeaux participated in art biennial Prospect.2 New Orleans that premiered her raucous multimedia Goddess Fortuna - (a disection of the medieval roots found in the novel Confederacy of Dunces with a special spotlight on Fortuna and philosopher Boethius) - in a production that was staged all throughout a three story historic French Quarter mansion and courtyard. She was also part of the international arts venue Open Spaces in Kansas City MO, also curated by Prospect founder Dan Cameron, that featured her installation Free Fall: Phrophecy and Free Will in John Milton’sParadise Lost - an array of 46 falling concrete columns covered in Milton’s prose and staked throughout a walnut grove in the city’s largest park. The project was again reinterpreted in 2021 in downtown New Orleans where 64 columns will remain in a state of fall through 2024, as installed down five blocks of a boulevard facing the Caesar’s Palace sponsored SuperDome, a modern day coliseum. The installation nods to both the rise and fall of civilizations and the genre of 'Concrete Poetry’ popular in Milton’s day, where the shape of words corresspond to conceptual narratives. Here the Paradise Lost verse is rendered in highway reflective vinyl to honor the blind poet’s core objective to make the “Darkness Visable” — as the headlights of passing cars literally illuminate his words into the night.
DeDeaux’s work has been featured in two recent solo exhibitions: Houston's Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology’s Being and Everything: Post-Art: by Dawn DeDeaux a meditation on post-human earth offered in assemblages configured from the debris of disasters, and deteriorating tools and cultural remnants that float unidentified into the void; and a Career Retrospective at the New Orleans Museum of Art, Dawn DeDeaux: The Space Between Worlds organized around a series of immersive installations that span a 50-year career. The exhibition offered new works including a 70’ immersive video installation titled Where’s Mary - that traces a catapulted old classical marble virgin with broken arms and no child as it travels amidst meteors and dead stars into deep space, and a 12’ sculpture of an amorphic-shaped asteroid titled Between Time.
The Retrospective is accompanied by a comprehensive 320 page illustrated catalogue published by Hatje Cantz, Berlin, with essays by Eva Diaz, Katie Pfohl, Debbora Battaglia, and historians Walter Issacson and John Barry who offers: “A ‘retrospective’ is by definition a look backward, but in the case of Dawn DeDeaux’s work, that definition doesn’t seem to fit. So much of what she’s done seems of the now. It’s beyond prescient.”
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
A focus on DeDeaux’s early work constitutes the final chapter of the book Discipline and Photograph, by art theorist James Huginin of Chicago Art Institute; and is represented in a comparative survey “Five Video Artists” by Larry Qualls, associate editor of MIT’s Performing Arts Journal / PAJ. Her work has been reviewed in numerous publications including New York Times, Art in America, and ArtForum, and featured on CBS Sunday Morning, Canada Public Broadcasting’s The Future, and NPR.
DeDeaux is a 1997 Rome Prize recipient as Knight Foundation Visiting Southern Artist at the American Academy in Rome, 2012 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Artist in Residence, 2014 Artist in Residence at Tulane University’s Center for Bioenvironmental Research and the Tulane School of Public Health, and 2021 Joan Mitchell Foundation Artist in Residence. She is the 2014 Prospect Alumna of the Year.
DeDeaux is founding editor of award-winning museum publication Arts Quarterly from 1976 - 1985, and among the core founders of the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center, serving as the Board’s First Executive Vice President through its formative years. She produced and hosted Louisiana’s first radio program on the arts, Art Now, for National Public Radio affiliate WWNO / University of New Orleans. As an educator DeDeaux established and directed a comprehensive arts program for a 6000 inmate facility in Orleans Parish Prison, Louisiana from 1988 - 1990; and has been Visiting Artist at a number of institutions including Maryland Institute College of Art (1991), Texas A&M Visualization Laboratory / School of Architecture (2006); Interdisciplinary Art & Environment Seminars for Princeton University (2018 & 2022), MFA advisor lecturer / mentor at School of Visual Arts (SVA), New York City (2015 - 2021), and MFA Critique Course for Tulane University (Spring 2023).
DeDeaux is founder of Camp Abundance in New Orleans - a residency compound for artists, animals, writers and filmmakers from around the world in association with the Mondrian Fund's Deltaworkers and Greece organization ArcAthens - and a host site for the City’s leading cultural institutions as special events and programming venue.
DeDeaux is the winner of the 1976 Demolition Derby in the Louisiana SuperDome as the only female contestant in a field of 35 drivers.