If a Giant Golden Lucky Dog; Glass Ladders to Nowhere; Revolt in the Factory of Pants; and the Goddess Fortuna played by Bounce Diva Katey Red is up your alley, then The Goddess Fortuna and Her Dunces, in an Attempt to Make Sense of It All by artist Dawn DeDeaux is the New Orleans art installation to see.
Last night’s Art for Art’s Sake block party was a pleasant blur. With the temperature in the sweet seventies and not a cloud in the autumn sky – really, not one – it was the perfect night for an art promenade. Read my AFAS preview here. Julia Street was crowded, but not as cramped as August’s White Linen Night. Lines at the outdoor bars were minimal and the food I sampled – macaroni and cheese studded with lobster – was outstanding. It would have been a great night out, even if the art had not been completely captivating.
Strange Alchemy By Eric D. Bookhardt, GAMBIT WEEKLY The objects on view are all too familiar, though not necessarily reassuring. Wrecking balls, ladders and water, lots of water, offer no…
Transcending the Walls of the Museum: Dawn DeDeaux’s Philosophy of Space by Jenelle Davis, ARTVOICES Prolific, astute, engaging and very New Orleanian, Dawn DeDeaux has established herself as a formidable…
The commission voted Tuesday to reject Dawn DeDeaux’s proposed “Steps Home” art installation in the Chartres Street pedestrian mall next to Jackson Square as well as a proposal by satirical conceptual artists Tony Campbell and Matt Vis to embed 10 metal medallions in the Bourbon Street sidewalk.
As you walk up the stairway to the upper floor of the Opelousas Museum of Art, you hear the sound of running water and chirping birds. Above that, you hear a woman singing a mournful song, her voice reflecting pain and longing.
One month after my rapid exodus from New Orleans, I return to a city dead. Yet there are familiar sights in the maze of debris: I see the work of Leonardo Drew in the matted rolls of wet housing insulation, Cy Twombly scratches in the enamel of wind-tossed cars, Keith Sonnier configurations in the twisted neon signs knotted with plastic bags, a Richard Serra monument in the mammoth, rusted, severed barge at an intersection . . . and on and on the story goes.
“Landscape Reclaimed,” a consistently smart show comprising the responses of conceptual artists to “landscape” and curated by Harry Philbrick, took full advantage of its site: a museum surrounded by aging, under-appreciated Minimalist sculpture and sweeping suburban lawns – in short a site just waiting for Komar & Melamid to stage a local version of their America’s Most Wanted, 1994.
Dawn Dedeaux employs various media, including photography, print, film, and video in her efforts to make political art that goes beyond mere documentary reportage. Like Sister Helen Prejean, the subject of Tim Robbins’s Dead Man Walking, a very conventional film, she is from New Orleans and very concerned with the underclass, specifically black youths abandoned to lives of violence and incarceration.
Dawn Dedeaux has been a student of political economy. Departments of political economy have not as yet been established in the traditional university and as a result she has had to pursue these studies in the public housing facilities and prisons of New Orleans that offer the most up to date variants of the curriculum and where admission requirements and rankings are commensurate with the local murder rate.