Dawn DeDeaux: The Space Between Worlds
New Orleans Museum of Art Retrospective
NOMA INTRODUCTION
Pioneering New Orleans–based multimedia artist Dawn DeDeaux (American, b. 1952) has long worked between worlds. Since the 1970s, her art has addressed an ever-widening series of gulfs: between people, between cultures and communities, and ultimately between humans and the Earth itself. Living and working in Louisiana—one of the fastest disappearing landmasses in the world—DeDeaux has been grappling with urgent questions about Earth and humanity’s survival for the last fifty years. As we face a world increasingly imperiled by rising waters, roiling temperatures, unchecked pandemics, and escalating social strife, the future DeDeaux’s work has long foreseen is now.
For DeDeaux, physicist Stephen Hawking’s prediction in the early 2000s that humans have 100 years left—not to save the planet, but to figure out how to flee—sounded an alarm bell that humanity has a limited-time-only opportunity to come together and co-exist. Her art implores us to seize our last opportunity to heal past divisions, counter present inequality, and forestall future strife.
Looking back on five decades of work, The Space Between Worlds resounds with a question that has animated DeDeaux’s entire career: If we are forced to escape—from flood, from fire, even from the Earth itself—who gets a seat on the bus? Who gets left behind?
PRESS
BROOKLYN RAIL
Focus: Dawn Dedeaux: The Space Between Worlds
ART SUMMARY VISUAL JOURNAL
AIRMAIL
Thomas Beller, “Doom and Bloom” / Dawn Dedeaux Retrospective at New Orleans Museum of Art October 23, 2021.
https://airmail.news/issues/2021-10-23/doom-and-bloom
THE ADVOCATE
Doug McCash, “Shattered glass, burned wood, and a monstrous mummy: New NOMA show is a forbidden feast,” NOLA.com, November 30, 2021.
https://www.nola.com/entertainment_life/arts/article_0ff2604e-51f6-11ec-a81b-eb2875c8d219.html
Sue Strachan, “Dawn DeDeaux: On the Cusp of Her NOMA Retrospective, the Artist Talks About Her Work and Her Life in New Orleans,” Mid-City Messenger, October 21, 2021.
https://midcitymessenger.com/2021/10/21/dawn-dedeaux-on-the-cusp-of-her-noma-retrospective-the-artist-talks-about-her-work-and-her-life-in-new-orleans/
Christopher Leach, “The Space Between Worlds: A New Experience at NOMA,” WGNO, October 20, 2021.
NOMA INTERVIEW WITH DAWN DEDEAUX
https://noma.org/qa-dawn-dedeaux-discusses-her-forthcoming-retrospective/