Dawn DeDeaux: The Space Between Worlds is the first comprehensive museum exhibition for the pioneering multimedia artist Dawn DeDeaux. Since the 1970s, DeDeaux’s practice has spanned video, performance, photography, and installation to create art that exists at the edge of the Anthropocene. Anticipating a future imperiled by the runaway population growth, breakneck industrial development, and the looming threat of climate change, DeDeaux has long worked between worlds of the present and the future. From early projects like CB Radio Booths, which linked underserved communities across New Orleans via radio and satellite, to more recent works from her MotherShip series, which plots an escape from a ruined earth, her art creates shared connections across seemingly impossible divides. One of the first American artists to connect questions about social justice to emerging environmental concerns, she creates spaces for community, collectivity, and critique that aim to counter present inequality and forestall future social strife. In the face of the existential threats we all face, her art is a lifeline that presents us with a limited-time-only opportunity to come together and coexist.

Dawn DeDeaux: The Space Between Worlds is organized around a series of immersive installations that span DeDeaux’s entire fifty-year career. The exhibition recreates installations from the 1970s to present by bringing together works salvaged from DeDeaux’s former art studio, which flooded during Hurricane Katrina, with pieces that will be reconstituted and reimagined for the present day. Early projects in the exhibition include America House (1989-91), which features remastered films that DeDeaux produced collaboratively with The Hardy Boys, the infamous New Orleans gang leaders, alongside an installation that seeks to upend the often segregated spatial dynamics of the urban environment. The exhibition also spotlights several of the artist’s early multi-channel video installations, including The Face of God (1996), whichpresciently imagined a future of environmental apocalypse as early as the mid-1990s. Performative installations such as Introducing Goddess Fortuna(2012) will shine light on the scarred history of the American South and its lingering effects on our political and environmental landscape. DeDeaux’songoing MotherShip series, most recently presented at MASS MoCA, responds to Stephen Hawking’s premise that mankind has 100 years left—not to save the planet but to leave—by envisioning our future in space.

Inspired by DeDeaux’s career-long commitment to community outreach, the exhibition reaches beyond the museum’s walls to engage diverse local communities as well as our endangered natural environment. The exhibition will restage several of DeDeaux’s most pointed and poignant community projects, from her early outreach work dealing with issues of mass incarceration to more recent participatory installations like Souvenirs of Earth, which will ask exhibition visitors to imagine what single item they would bring with them if forced to flee the planet. The exhibition also includes several outdoor sculptural installations and an ambitious new public works project that responds to rapidly receding coastlines across the world.  Looking back on five decades of work, this exhibition also turns to the future, asking the urgent questions that have animated DeDeaux’s entire career: Who gets a seat on the bus? Who gets remembered, and who gets left behind?