Dawn DeDeaux (born 1952) is an American visual artist based in New Orleans, Louisiana whose practice has included installation art, sculpture, photography, technology and multimedia works.Green, Penelope. "Between Apocalypses," The New York Times, October 15, 2014, p. D1. Retrieved September 28, 2021.Artforum. "Dawn DeDeaux and Arthur Lewis Join Prospect New Orleans Board," News. February 12, 2020. Retrieved September 28, 2021. Since the 1970s, her work has examined social, political and environmental issues encountered at both the global and local level of her native Louisiana.Lewis, Joe. "Dedeaux's Soul Shadows & Warrior Myths," Artspace, May 1993.Qualls, Larry. "Five Video Artists: Krzysztof Wodiczko, Diana Thater, Jocelyn Taylor, Janet Biggs, & Dawn DeDeaux," Performing Arts Journal, September 1996, p. 1–13.Ulaby, Neda. "Forget The Wreckage: Museums' Katrina Shows Look At How City Has Moved On," NPR All Things Considered, August 9, 2015. Retrieved September 30, 2021.Díaz, Eva. "The Photographer Using Space Travel to Theorize about Climate Change," Aperture, October 14, 2020. Retrieved September 28, 2021. In 2014, American Theatre wrote that she created "immersive, future-tense" work at the intersection of visual arts, electronically driven theatre and site-specific installation, with sculpture, drawings and digital technology "inspired by ancient myths, mathematical forecasts, symbols, visions of apocalyptic landscapes and utopian longings."Blankenship, Mark and Stephanie Coen. "14 Theatrical Plans to Change the World," American Theatre, December 11, 2014. Retrieved September 28, 2021.
DeDeaux's work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art,Golden, Thelma. Black Male Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994. Retrieved September 28, 2021. MASS MoCA,Sheets, Hilarie M. "A Museum Where Giant Art Has Room to Breathe," The New York Times, May 26, 2017, p. AR21. Retrieved September 28, 2021. Hammer Museum,Hathman, Diane. "As Defiant as Always," Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, April 23, 1995, p. 5, 84–5. Retrieved September 28, 2021. Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art,Pascucci, Ernest. "Landscape Reclaimed," Artforum, February 1997. Retrieved September 28, 2021. New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA),Calas, Terrington. "Ten Years Gone / New Orleans Museum of Art," New Orleans Art Review, Fall 2015, p. 4–8. Retrieved September 28, 2021. and Ballroom Marfa,Stevens, Rachel. "The World According to New Orleans at Ballroom, Marfa," …might be good journal, Issue #169, 2011. among other venues. In 1996, she was one of eight artists selected to represent the American south at the Summer Olympics in Atlanta.Knowles, Susan W. "Art at the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games," Art Papers, December 1996, p. 34.Pfohl, Katie A. "Q&A: Dawn DeDeaux discusses her forthcoming retrospective," New Orleans Museum of Art, May 26, 2020. Retrieved September 27, 2021. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Joan Mitchell Foundation, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and American Academy in Rome, among other institutions.Kemp, John R. "Dawn DeDeaux," 64 Parishes, September 12, 2012. Retrieved September 28, 2021.Joan Mitchell Foundation. Dawn DeDeaux, Supported Artists. Retrieved September 28, 2021.American Academy in Rome. "All Fellows." Retrieved September 27, 2021.
Life and career DeDeaux was born in New Orleans in 1952, the eldest of six children. As a child, she lost two siblings to disease and from the age of eleven was raised by her grandmother, Hilda Warfield, on Esplanade Avenue next door to the Degas House. She learned to paint as a teen from a young New York painter, Laura Adams, who rented a room at her grandmother's house for three years.Kennon, Alexandra. "Suddenly, Last Spaceship," Country Roads, October 23, 2020. Retrieved September 28, 2021. Between 1970 and 1973, DeDeaux studied art at Louisiana State University, University of Colorado and Newcomb College, followed by mass communications studies at Loyola University New Orleans (1975–6).
In the latter 1970s, DeDeaux turned from painting to socially oriented installations and street works that traveled New Orleans' communication systems and underserved communities, inspired in part by media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s concept of the global village. In 1976, she was part of the group of artists that founded the city's Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) and she started NOMA's Arts Quarterly publication, serving as editor for eight years.Fagaly, William. The Nightcrawler King: Memoirs of an Art Museum Curator, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2020. Retrieved September 28, 2021. That same year, she also won the demolition derby held at the Louisiana Superdome, the only female contestant in a field of 35 drivers. In the 1980s, she established and directed a comprehensive arts program for a 6,000-inmate facility in Orleans Parish and began producing large-scale installations and immersive, synchronized media environments related to that work. These projects attracted wider attention, through exhibitions at the Whitney and Hammer museums,Jones IV, James T. "Black Male: Staring down the Stereotypes," USA Today, November 30, 1994.Kimmelman, Michael. "Constructing Images Of the Black Male," The New York Times, November 11, 1994, p. C1. Retrieved September 28, 2021.Nochlin, Linda. "Learning From 'Black Male,'" Art in America, March 1995. Retrieved September 28, 2021. the Olympics, and CAC,Vetrocq, Marcia. "Dawn DeDeaux at Contemporary Arts Center," Art in America, June 1993. among others.Frank, Peter. "Art Pick of the Week," LA Weekly, May, 1993.
Beginning in the latter 1990s, DeDeaux turned to environmental concerns linked to social justice in installations and multimedia works.Angelini, Surpik. "Being and Everything: Post Art by Dawn DeDeaux," Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology, April 2, 2020. Retrieved September 27, 2021. In 1997, she purchased two small shotgun houses, one to live in and one a digital studio she named the "Art Shack"; New Orleans art critic D. Eric Bookhardt likened the latter to a "manic Louise Nevelson, with a texture like something a Creole Anselm Kiefer might have concocted… a sculpture posing as a house." In 2005, Hurricane Katrina collapsed the roofs of both homes; a year later a fire burned down a larger studio, destroying a third of her work. In response to these disasters, DeDeaux began making work out of the debris and with a more apocalyptic theme in exhibitions at the Blanton Museum of Art, CAC, NOMA, and New Orleans' Prospect international art biennials, among others.Díaz, Eva. "Prospect.2 New Orleans," Artforum, February 2012. Retrieved September 28, 2021.Yablonsky, Linda. "Bright Prospects," Artforum, October 31, 2014. Retrieved September 28, 2021.
Work and reception Throughout her career, DeDeaux has merged art with new technologies—electronic, digital and multimedia—seeking to reach wider audiences with work addressing class, race, justice and environmental issues.New Orleans Museum of Art. "Dawn DeDeaux: The Space Between Worlds," Exhibitions. Retrieved September 27, 2021.Hugunin, James. A Survey of Representation of Prisoners In the United States: Discipline And Photographs, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999.< Retrieved September 28, 2021. Her key themes include the frailty and impermanence of people and place, the interconnectedness of all people as well as other planetary life systems, and survival in the face of adversity.Markonish, Denise. Dawn DeDeaux and Lonnie Holley: Thumbs Up for the Mothership, North Adams, MA: MASS MoCA, 2017.Budick, Ariella. "Mass MoCA —A Revelation Around Every Corner," Financial Times, August 2, 2017. Retrieved September 28, 2021. Despite her sociopolitical, often Cassandra-like focus, her work is regarded as hopeful and empathetic rather than didactic.
Early work DeDeaux employed new media and democratic communication forms in her early work, seeking to encourage a sense of shared struggle across the racial and class divides she witnessed in New Orleans. For CB Radio Booths (1975–6), she installed CB radios in nine gutted outdoor telephone stands to create a pre-internet form of social media—a free, designated communication network linking random strangers across south Louisiana in anonymous conversations.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, she produced portraits, installations and videos that developed out of her arts program in a local prison and the relationships she formed there.Schruers, Fred. "The Killer Cop And The Cocaine Conspiracy," Esquire (UK), February 1996. In works such as the installation America House (1989–90) and the guerrilla/documentary style videos Drive By Shooting and The Hardy Boys & Nancy Drew, she sought to give voice to the experiences of marginalized communities and the incarcerated.Pleasure Dome. Soul Shadows, 1994. Retrieved September 28, 2021.
The controversial traveling show Soul Shadows: Urban Warrior Myths (Contemporary Museum Baltimore, CCA, Los Angeles Photography Center, 1993) examined young African-American males within a catacomb-like, media-intensive "Sensurround"-like installation.Muchnic, Suzanne. "'Soul Shadows' Exhibition: $19,000 Well Spent?" Los Angeles Times, May 1, 1993. Retrieved September 28, 2021. The work featured a hallway indebted to Rodin's The Gates of Hell, lined with ten rooms containing portraits, gold and street iconography, and videos documenting lives of violence, the voices blended with a driving environmental soundtrack. LA Weekly critic Peter Frank wrote, "DeDeaux's anti-funhouse Soul Shadows may be heavy going, but it is not blame-slinging 'PC' agitprop: It conveys not anger, but empathy, engagement and hope" designed to "de-heroicize urban warfare and re-validate its warriors/victims." Several of the portraits—shrine-like, gold-leafed, over life-size photographs of black youths assuming the stylized guises of ancient deities, warriors or modern celebrities—were included in the Whitney Museum exhibition "Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art" (1994-5), curated by Thelma Golden.
Environmentally oriented works DeDeaux's installations and multimedia works beginning in the mid-1990s have focused on environmental themes of survival, disaster, extinction and escape. The multichannel video work The Face of God, In Search Of (1996 Summer Olympics) was an early immersive media environment centered on an imagined bedroom, which used six synchronized projectors to reimagine Tennessee Williams' play Suddenly Last Summer as a collective struggle to survive in the face of natural and human-induced threat or tragedy. Depicting nature as both majestic and indiscriminately cruel, it combined superimposed imagery of nature's cycles, recordings of Williams' stage direction, and references to the rapid extinction of species. Postcards to Teddy Roosevelt While Thinking of Yves Klein (Aldrich Museum, 1997) juxtaposed haunting sound and images of a deer carcass alongside a highway and sheep grazing near an electrical fence on two upturned television monitors with photocollages of American landscapes defaced by strip-mining and industry, a stark contrast to Roosevelt's romanticized celebration of the west.