Three days before flying to Italy for the most important exhibition of her life, New Orleans artist Dawn DeDeaux was striding to and from her kitchen, forks in one hand, spoons in the other.<\/p>\n
She paused beside her friend Susan Taylor, director of the New Orleans Museum of Art, for a moment to chat, cheerily, about the end of the world.<\/p>\n
\u201cA black hole in the sea! It will self-subsume,\u201d DeDeaux said, setting the utensils on a 15-foot dining table that spans the living room of her Gentilly home, an old po-boy shop that she has remade \u2014 artwork by artwork, object by object \u2014 into an exhibition of its own kind.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know,\u201d Taylor said, shaking her head as she read aloud from an article about the puzzling discovery<\/a> of an undersea neutrino.<\/p>\n Then, a knock at the door.<\/p>\n \u201cHello! Hello!\u201d DeDeaux exclaimed, throwing her arms into the air before wrapping them around a guest who had arrived to her dinner party. \u201cLook who it is!\u201d<\/p>\n For decades, the 73-year-old conceptual artist has been creating art\u00a0that explores the universe\u2019s most pressing questions with photography and video, sculpture and installation. Behind each work is an academic study that struck her, a nonfiction book that moved her, a philosophy that tweaked her previous beliefs.<\/p>\n Oftentimes, all three. \u201cI can\u2019t look at anything in a singular way,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s all relational.\u201d<\/p>\n But despite their grand scale and heady inspiration, DeDeaux\u2019s works are intimate, human. She builds a world \u2014 then invites you in.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Dawn DeDeaux greets Filippo Meozzi and Paolo Meozzi at the door during a dinner party at Camp Abundance in New Orleans, Wednesday, April 1, 2026. (Photo by Sophia Germer, The Times-Picayune)<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIf you give her a conventional environment and let her follow her instincts, it will inevitably be transformed into something marvelous,\u201d said New York-based curator Dan Cameron, who did just that for Prospect New Orleans, the contemporary art triennial, among other exhibitions.<\/p>\n But she\u2019s not creating environments only for art exhibitions. Her home, a cluster of four buildings she\u2019s dubbed Camp Abundance, \u201cpushes the bounds of what art can be,\u201d Cameron said. It feels both antique and futuristic, old-world and space-age. White columns, inscribed with the epic poem \u201cParadise Lost,\u201d stand near the camp\u2019s entrance. Clear acrylic ladders, offering a fragile escape from this world, lean against wood slats. Massive metal plates, embossed with soft images of swamps and trees, cover one wall.<\/p>\n In May, DeDeaux will remake her most important space, yet \u2014 the final room of the Arsenale at the Venice Biennale, where she will be among 111 artists featured in the prestigious central group show<\/a>, titled \u201cIn Minor Keys.\u201d Fellow New Orleanian Demond Melancon, a big chief in the Black Masking Indian tradition, will present his work there\u00a0as well<\/a>.<\/p>\n Being picked for the career-making Biennale, arguably the contemporary art world\u2019s most important show, is an honor DeDeaux never anticipated.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a chance for the world to discover what New Orleans knows and New York City ought to have learned by now, Cameron said. \u201cIt\u2019s now time for Dawn to get the recognition she deserves.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Camp Abundance, artist Dawn DeDeaux\u2019s home base, \u201cpushes the bounds of what art can be,\u201d a curator said.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n For years, DeDeaux wondered if she\u2019d made a mistake by remaining in New Orleans.<\/p>\n She\u2019d grown up here, the eldest of six children. When two siblings died in the same year, her family ruptured and her empathy grew. DeDeaux moved into her grandmother\u2019s house on Esplanade Avenue, a short walk from NOMA, where she witnessed White flight house by house, block by block.<\/p>\n A bohemian artist arrived, renting a room upstairs. She taught DeDeaux to paint, introduced her to literature and brought her to New York City galleries.<\/p>\n Taking courses at one college, then the next, DeDeaux met Robert Yarber<\/a>, a painter and her \u201cfirst great love.\u201d When another sibling got sick, spurring her family\u2019s second rupture, Yarber was so focused on his work and so unaccustomed to loss that he didn\u2019t support her the way she needed, she said. She broke it off.<\/p>\n But Yarber, who went on to exhibit in the 1984 Venice Biennale, would reappear in her story, decades later.<\/p>\n DeDeaux began making more conceptual work \u2014 first about racial divides, then about the environment, always about justice.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Celebrated multimedia artist Dawn DeDeaux, whose work finds beauty in calamity, poses in her studio at Camp Abundance in New Orleans in March. (Photo by Sophia Germer, The Times-Picayune)<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Pieces of those works now stand among\u00a0her backyard ginger plants, lean against the fence, and hang from the walls of Camp Abundance, which she\u2019s been restoring\u00a0with the help of former neighbor and longtime collaborator Gary Craddock\u00a0for more than a decade.<\/p>\n In the mid-1970s, she hooked up telephone booths to CB radio channels, encouraging conversation across New Orleans neighborhoods, races and divides. A silver phone booth, which she reimagined for her 2021 retrospective at NOMA<\/a>, stands in her garden. In the 1990s, her stately photographs of young Black men were shown as part of a controversial show at the Whitney Museum \u2014 and subpoenaed by the FBI<\/a>. (They fill boxes atop a closet in a cottage she offers up for artist residencies.)<\/p>\n \u201cI think Dawn is fundamentally inclined to want to see the wrongs of the world righted, somehow,\u201d Cameron said, tackling issues of \u201crace, gender, class \u2014 topics you\u2019re not supposed to talk about at dinner parties.\u201d<\/p>\n She was already exploring themes of escape and extinction when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005.<\/p>\n She got out \u201cin a van loaded with her computers, three neighbors who were afraid to go to the Superdome, an out-of-towner who had been staying with her and working on her website, six finches, an aged dog and a cat,\u201d as a 2014 New York Times article<\/a> put it.<\/p>\n Returning a month later, she found two roofs caved in, her studio collapsed and a third of her work destroyed. Then, the following year, when she was out of town, her studio burned down.<\/p>\n And yet. She believes the hurricane and its aftermath flipped New Orleans\u2019 vantage point, freeing it from its own nostalgia and romanticized history. \u201cWe went from looking to our past, which was thought to be grander than our present, to looking at the future,\u201d DeDeaux said. \u201cI think we have now \u2014 and I got it right away \u2014 a front-row seat to the future.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s partly because New Orleans is \u201cbuilt on baby mud.\u201d Salt water is eating away at the marsh grass that holds that mud together. Undercurrents are pulling\u00a0at it. \u201cSo we are the youngest land mass and the first to go.\u201d Thinking in geological time, as DeDeaux does, this lacy bit of land mass is changing quickly,\u00a0right outside\u00a0her door.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Artist Dawn DeDeaux cuts into one of the many dishes she cooked for a gathering at Camp Abundance in early April.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI give you all this,\u201d she said, \u201cbecause I think all of a sudden, I felt very alive and correct and energized to be here.\u201d<\/p>\n At a time when the apocalypse seems near and the future feel out of the common person\u2019s hands, \u201cthere is power in speculation,\u201d said Eva D\u00edaz, a New York-based art critic and historian whose book, \u201cAfter Spaceship Earth: Art, Techno-utopia, and Other Science Fictions,\u201d focuses partly on DeDeaux\u2019s work. It\u2019s a coincidence that DeDeaux landed at the corner of Abundance Street, she said, but the name Camp Abundance leans into the optimism of DeDeaux\u2019s work, the \u201cpossibility of plentitude.\u201d<\/p>\n Though New York City would have brought her closer to the art market, DeDeaux couldn\u2019t have connected a whole half block of buildings there, couldn\u2019t have played with scale in the same way, D\u00edaz said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe connections, the community that she is always creating \u2026 give her a certain power,\u201d D\u00edaz said. \u201cThe power and freedom to be a late-career artist, standing on your own two feet.\u201d<\/p>\n Outside a warehouse on the West Bank, DeDeaux grabbed a hammer.<\/p>\n On a folding table in front of her was a panel of glass as tall as she is. Around her was a team from Denali Art Solutions, makers who help her fabricate her artworks. Inside the warehouse were a dozen wooden crates, neatly labeled, that in just a few days would be shipped to Venice.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re not going to break it up too much,\u201d she said, wearing sunglasses rather than safety goggles, adjusting the black fur hat atop her head. \u201cIt\u2019ll break on its own, crossing the Atlantic.\u201d<\/p>\n Before anyone had readied a camera to capture the moment, DeDeaux pulled back and hit the edge of glass with one long, confident stroke. With a crunch, it shattered, glittering in the sun.<\/p>\n She looked up with wide eyes and an impish grin. Then she let out a long, joyful laugh.<\/p>\n \u201cDawn!\u201d someone said. \u201cI wasn\u2019t ready!\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Artist Dawn DeDeaux breaks glass for a new, top-secret exhibition at Denali Art Solutions in Harvey, La. Monday February 23, 2026. (Staff photo by David Grunfeld, The Times-Picayune | NOLA.com<\/a>)<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n At this point in her career, DeDeaux could have her works manufactured by other people, said Alexander Buschmann, Denali\u2019s wood shop\u00a0lead. But DeDeaux shattered pane after pane, kicking up her heel when she got one on the first smack.<\/p>\n \u201cI can\u2019t believe you don\u2019t have a stunt double,\u201d Buschmann told DeDeaux, admiringly, as he helped coax the shards into a bucket.<\/p>\n Spreading the glass into the light box, a step she\u2019ll do in Venice, requires a bit of Louisiana-specific equipment, already packed into a crate. She throws it, she said, demonstrating her smooth stroke, with a gumbo spoon.<\/p>\n DeDeaux has created a version of this piece, \u201cGulf to Galaxy,\u201d several times before, first after Hurricane Katrina, later for her retrospective. It was inspired by a post-Katrina journey: In the weeks after the storm, DeDeaux walked for hours to find out if her mother\u2019s Mississippi home was still standing. It wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n As she walked back, crying, she came across a smashed shopping center. Standing nearly knee-high in a heap of shattered glass, she looked up, noticing the sun shining and the pelicans flying.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd when I look back down \u2026 the sun is hitting this glass, and I am in a field of diamonds,\u201d she said. Tears still in her eyes, she said out loud: \u201cOh my God, this is the most beautiful thing I\u2019ve ever seen.\u201d<\/p>\n So she shaped shattered glass into glowing pinwheels, evoking hurricanes, galaxies or both. Devastation and beauty, swirled together.<\/p>\n Much of her work after Katrina contained that swirl. Burned, blackened timber fragments that stand like noble statues. Bowls of dirt, beautifully displayed. Magisterial planks, embedded with images of water, reflect\u00a0water levels in neighborhoods throughout the city, after the levies breached.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Artist Dawn DeDeaux reflects into one of her art pieces at Camp Abundance in New Orleans, Thursday, March 26, 2026. (Photo by Sophia Germer, The Times-Picayune)<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n DeDeaux, too, contains those contrasts.<\/p>\n She dresses in head-to-toe black, most days, but often wears heels so chunky they make her laugh: \u201cThey\u2019re ridiculous!\u201d She speaks seriously about climate change and calamity, then refers to Earth as \u201cthis wonderful spinning graveyard.\u201d She weighs her role as an artist, now and in the past, with great thoughtfulness, then claims, with just as much seriousness, to be a better chef than an artist.<\/p>\n \u201cThe table is where everything happens,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s what I do best.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Dawn DeDeaux’s studio, photographed in March, is just one part of Camp Abundance, the compound she\u2019s created in Gentilly.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n DeDeaux had been up since 4 a.m., as she had most days since last summer. Venice time.<\/p>\n Since even before\u00a0she was invited to the Biennale, she\u2019d been ruminating on a massive installation. The Biennale has strict rules against revealing the show\u2019s content, but it will be among the grandest works she\u2019s ever made, incorporating sculpture and sketches, found objects and a new film piece.<\/p>\n At last, just days before her flight to Italy, a breakthrough: She wrote the film\u2019s script.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s just been stewing, stewing,\u201d DeDeaux told Taylor, before the dinner party\u2019s guests arrived. \u201cI mean, I\u2019ve been thinking about this for a year and a half, this kind of film component, and it just came out. Boom, boom, boom.\u201d<\/p>\n The dinner was meant to welcome Aristides Lonothetis, founder of ARCAthens, who was joining two artists in residency at Camp Abundance. Wearing an apron, DeDeaux delivered drink after drink, dish after dish: Sweet figs cushioned in brie,\u00a0mushroom risotto pungent with truffle, a pair of pork tenderloins.<\/p>\n The Biennale is, in a way, a result of an invitation into her table.<\/p>\n Years before she was named curator of the Biennale, the late Koyo Kouoh, then based in Cape Town, had been traveling through the American South on a kind of Civil Rights tour. Over several nights sitting in DeDeaux’s backyard, beneath the stars and a disco ball from parties past, she and DeDeaux discussed art, life and the world. Industrialized agriculture and the Anthropocene and the privatization of space.<\/p>\n DeDeaux is \u201cforever the artist,\u201d but at that moment, she had no grand ambitions. \u201cWe were just talking as two people who love the arts.\u201d<\/p>\n Kouoh went on to become Venice\u2019s curator, dying just days before the exhibition\u2019s theme was announced<\/a>. Reading Kouoh\u2019s concept for the show, DeDeaux immediately understood why she had included her. She had quoted James Baldwin: \u201cThere is reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as an ancient friend.\u201d<\/p>\n After setting a dozen dishes out, DeDeaux finally sat down at the table\u2019s end for what she\u2019d dubbed, with a laugh, \u201cthe last supper.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Artist Dawn DeDeaux sets food on the table during her dinner party in New Orleans. \u201cThe table is where everything happens,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cEat! Eat!\u201d she demanded.<\/p>\n They ate and gave toasts. They demanded stories \u2014 including one about the time, in 1976, that DeDeaux won the demolition derby in the Superdome, earning the moniker \u201cDeadly Dawn.\u201d Or about how she reconnected with Yarber at a mutual friend\u2019s memorial service, marrying him last summer in her backyard, before a massive steel ring, part of her massive MotherShip series<\/a>, in matching white suits.<\/p>\n But DeDeaux didn\u2019t hold court. Over the course of the meal, DeDeaux found ways, big and small, to delight in her guests\u2019 talents, noting their expertise, complimenting their taste and connecting their shared histories.<\/p>\n Over cognac, they debated Greek history, including a study in \u201cNature\u201d about ancient DNA, and, several times, DeDeaux asked big questions, admitting her lack of knowledge as often as she revealed her depth of understanding.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is what I love,\u201d she said, mischievously, \u201cwhen it starts to stew.\u201d<\/p>\n At one point, as Taylor spoke about Roman art, DeDeaux\u2019s eyes widened.<\/p>\n \u201cElaborate!\u201d she said, leaning forward. \u201cElaborate!\u201d<\/p>\n Her guests leaned in, too.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Days before leaving for Venice, Dawn DeDeaux raises a glass with dinner guests at her New Orleans home.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n
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