Arthur Roger Gallery is proud to announce that our artist Dawn DeDeaux has been selected to participate in the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. DeDeaux will present her work in the main international exhibition, In Minor Keys, opening in Venice on May 9, 2026, and on view through November 22, 2026.
DeDeaux is one of 111 invited participants in In Minor Keys, a global gathering of individual artists, duos, collectives, and artist-led organizations from across many geographies and regions. Her selection was made by the late Koyo Kouoh — the first African woman to serve as Artistic Director of the Biennale’s central exhibition — who passed away in May 2025, just days before she was to announce the exhibition publicly. La Biennale di Venezia has carried her vision forward in full, with the support of her family and curatorial team.
The resonance between Kouoh’s curatorial vision and DeDeaux’s practice is deep and personal. The two met during a visit Kouoh made to New Orleans, gathering over several evenings at DeDeaux’s home base, Camp Abundance — a cluster of four buildings she has transformed into a studio, gardens, and residence for visiting artists. Their conversations ranged across art, life, the Anthropocene, industrialized agriculture, and the fate of the world. “We were just talking as two people who love the arts,” DeDeaux recalled. When she later read Kouoh’s concept for the show — with its references to second-lines and “artistic practices that open portals” — she immediately understood why she had been included. “It reflects so much of our conversation,” she said. “What a gift, a gift from the grave.”
In Minor Keys is organized not by sections but by what Kouoh called “undercurrent priorities” — conceptual motifs including enchantment, procession, spiritual rest, and what she termed “Schools”: ecosystems of art-making rooted in local territories while reaching outward. The exhibition draws on literary references, including Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, texts Kouoh admired for their evocation of thresholds between lifeworlds and a magical realism that deepens emotional experience. DeDeaux’s practice — spanning decades of work shaped by Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana’s vanishing coastline, global ecological collapse, and visionary futures — fits squarely within this spirit.
The Venice exhibition will bring together a selection of works from across DeDeaux’s recent practice, including works featured in her acclaimed 2022 career retrospective, The Space Between Worlds at the New Orleans Museum of Art, alongside the premiere of a major new large-scale installation. A complete checklist of works cannot be revealed until after the official opening in May 2026.
DeDeaux has been represented by Arthur Roger Gallery for thirty years. Her ongoing MotherShip Series has been presented at MASS MoCA and the Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology in Houston; a comprehensive publication from Hatje Cantz, Berlin accompanied her retrospective. Her work is the concluding subject of art historian Eva Diaz’s new book After Spaceship Earth (Yale University Press), and is featured in Aperture Magazine, Sculpture Magazine, and The Brooklyn Rail. She is an American Academy in Rome Prize winner and a former Artist-in-Residence at the Robert Rauschenberg and Joan Mitchell Foundations.
The 61st Venice Biennale, In Minor Keys, opens May 9, 2026. Pre-opening days are May 6–8. The exhibition runs through November 22, 2026, at the Giardini, the Arsenale, and additional venues across Venice.
For press inquiries or image requests, please contact Arthur Roger Gallery at (504) 522-1999.