Dawn DeDeaux | Artists’ Chronicles 2020

Dawn DeDeaux’s monumental retrospective THE SPACE BETWEEN WORLDS will open October 2021 at the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA). The exhibition was previously scheduled for fall 2020. The retrospective will be the first comprehensive museum survey for this pioneering multi-media artist. The exhibition will be accompanied by a richly illustrated hardcover catalog published by Hatje Cantz. A Q&A with Dawn DeDeaux and NOMA discussing her forthcoming retrospective can be seen here.

Since the 1970s Dawn DeDeaux’s work has spanned video, performance, photography, and installation creating art that is visionary. Initially, her work aimed to cross the race and class divides she witnessed along with the stark inequalities that define life in New Orleans. Themes in her work over the past decades have explored scenarios of pandemic and ecological degradation that would reshape human life and culture. 

Dawn grew up on Esplanade Avenue just down the street from the New Orleans Museum of Art which she frequently visited. She studied painting for eight years before Dawn knew she had to push her art into the streets and onto the screen.

DeDeaux’s retrospective will unfold across a series of immersive installations that showcase her videos, sculptures, photographs, installations, and assemblage art. It will recreate projects from the 1970s to the present. DeDeaux’s voice is vitally important as we consider local and global conversations about social justice, the environment, and other urgent contemporary challenges.

Dawn feels that “as a recipient of the greatest circumstantial gift of empathy you understand that you are part of a collective human family. Empathy illuminates the frailty and impermanence of people and places and shows us how intertwined we are with all other planetary life systems. This totality and impermanence steer all of my work.” 

The Arthur Roger Gallery has represented Dawn Dedeaux for the past 25 years. 

Dawn DeDeaux has released a print titled “Self-Portrait with Flowers Because There is No One Else Here”. All proceeds from the sale of the print will be donated to the Krewe of Red Beans Feed the Second Line campaign.