Dawn DeDeaux

[17] In the latter 1970s, DeDeaux turned from painting to socially oriented installations and street works that traveled New Orleans' communication systems and underserved communities, inspired in part by media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s concept of the global village.

[1][17] In the 1980s, she established and directed a comprehensive arts program for a 6,000-inmate facility in Orleans Parish and began producing large-scale installations and immersive, synchronized media environments related to that work.

[4][5][33] 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.

[16][34] 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.

[25][26][35] 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.

[4][26] LA Weekly critic Peter Frank wrote, "DeDeaux's anti-funhouse Soul Shadows may be heavy going, but it is not blame-slinging 'PC' agitprop: It conveys not anger, but empathy, engagement and hope" designed to "de-heroicize urban warfare and re-validate its warriors/victims.

[13][6][36] 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.

[7][31] Inspired by R. Buckminster Fuller’s warnings about population expansion and resource depletion and the Afrofuturism of funk groups such as Parliament-Funkadelic, the images link climate change relocation, the disorientation of space travel, and a sense of the future loss of Earth; critics suggest they have taken on new meanings during COVID-19-era concerns over airborne disease and the regulation of breathing.

[7] The Space Clowns images became part of DeDeaux's large-scale, mixed-media "MotherShip" project, which took Stephen Hawking’s assertion that humanity had 100 years left—not to save the Earth but to leave it—as its launching point.

For her night-time, public "Prospect.2" installation, The Goddess Fortuna and Her Subjects in an Effort to Make Sense of It All (2011), she drew on John Kennedy Toole’s New Orleans novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, creating a complex, 20,000-square-foot multimedia work that encompassed a three-story mansion and its balconies and courtyard.