Dawn DeDeaux

Dawn DeDeaux, Gulf to Galaxy, floor installation, two tons of shattered glass, first created in 2006; recreated for Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology, 2021 (shown, two views).

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. Since the 1970s, her work has examined social, political and environmental issues encountered at both the global and local level of her native Louisiana. 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."

DeDeaux's work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MASS MoCA, Hammer Museum, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA), and Ballroom Marfa, among other venues. In 1996, she was one of eight artists selected to represent the American south at the Summer Olympics in Atlanta. 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.

Life and career DeDeaux was born in New Orleans in 1952, the eldest of six children. 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). That same year, she also won the demolition derby held at the Louisiana Superdome, the only female contestant in a field of 35 drivers. among others.

Beginning in the latter 1990s, DeDeaux turned to environmental concerns linked to social justice in installations and multimedia works. 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."

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. 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. Despite her sociopolitical, often Cassandra-like focus, her work is regarded as hopeful and empathetic rather than didactic. 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.

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. 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.

From 2012 to 2016, DeDeaux created the digital photocollage series, Space Clowns—astronaut-like creatures on metal panels derived from photographs she made of first responders dressed in protective equipment, whose decorated surfaces of lace, floral and wrought-iron patterns served as projected uniforms of the future. In 2018, DeDeaux created the outdoor installation Free Fall: Prophecy and Free Will in Milton’s Paradise Lost for "Open Spaces 2018" in Kansas City, a reflection on collective numbness and helplessness in the face of social decay, consisting of 48 tall columns installed at angles among walnut trees, each printed with a verse from Milton’s work in highway reflective vinyl.