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?

Dawn DeDeaux: The Space Between Worlds is organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art and is sponsored by Mr. and Mrs. Sydney Besthoff; Ralph and Susan Brennan; Dr. and Mrs. Byron Crawford; Catherine Burns Tremaine; Sarah and Harvey Wier, in memory of Nan Wier; David B. Workman; and The Robert E. Zetzmann Family Foundation. Additional support is provided by Tina Freeman and Philip Woollam; The Arthur Roger Fund for NOMA; John C. Abajian and Scott R. Simmons; Mr. and Mrs. Charles B. Davis; Melissa and John D. Gray; Renee and Stewart Peck; Hugh and Beth Lambert; Yorke Lawson; Robyn and Andrew Schwarz; Shaun and Foster Duncan; Charles L. Whited; and Friends of Bill Bertrand, in honor of his retirement. Special thanks to collaborators Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology, John Fischbach, Misha Kachkachishvili and Esplanade Recording Studio, and Pedro Segundo.

Press

Thomas Beller, “Doom and Bloom,” Airmail, October 23, 2021.

Doug McCash, “Shattered glass, burned wood, and a monstrous mummy: New NOMA show is a forbidden feast,” NOLA.com, November 30, 2021.

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.

Christopher Leach, “The Space Between Worlds: A New Experience at NOMA,” WGNO, October 20, 201.