The Space Between Worlds: Dawn DeDeaux

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.

New York-based curator, art writer and educator Dan Cameron launched his career in 1982 with Extended Sensibilities at the New Museum, the first institutional effort in the US to examine gay & lesbian identity in art. For over forty years, Cameron has held senior curatorial positions at the New Museum, Orange County Museum of Art and CAC New Orleans, and organized more than a hundred museum exhibitions, including surveys of Martin Wong, David Wojnarowicz, Faith Ringgold, and others. In 2007, Dan founded Prospect New Orleans, the contemporary art triennial to benefit the city after Hurricane Katrina, and organized the first two editions. More recently, his book on Nicole Eisenman’s paintings was published in 2021 by Lund Humphries.

Nationally known artist, arts administrator, educator, and author Joseph S. Lewis III is a Professor in the Department of Art and was the Dean of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts at University of California, Irvine from 2010 to 2014. As a visual and performing artist, he has had numerous exhibitions of his work in several residency programs including Anderson Ranch, CO; Cité des Artes in Paris; and the Darkroom Projectes in Milan, Italy. He has written for Art in America, The LA Weekly, and Artforum, and was a contributing editor for Artspace and a correspondent for Contemporanea, an international arts magazine. His essays regarding the confluence of art, technology, and society have been published in anthologies and peer reviewed journals.