Dawn DeDeaux is a highly-regarded American artist born and based in New Orleans. Her work from recent decades is influenced by cataclysmic events such as Hurricane Katrina, the BP Oil Spill, Louisiana’s vanishing coastline, and challenges to planetary existence.  DeDeaux has been at the forefront of envisioning a post-Anthropocene world as part of her ongoing MotherShip Series, recently on view for two years at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and at Houston’s Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology.   
 
DeDeaux has been an artist-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome and the Robert Rauschenberg and Joan Mitchell Foundations where she contributed works for her 2022 career retrospective at New Orleans Museum of Art. That retrospective, The Space Between Worlds, was accompanied by a comprehensive book published by Hatje Cantz, Berlin.  
 
DeDeaux’s future-tense works consider both the micro and macro challenges ranging from pandemics to environmental hazards—inspiring her survivor wardrobe series Space Clowns and other futurist meditations featured in Eva Diaz’s book After Spaceship Earth and her related essay Aperture magazine. 
 
Works by DeDeaux are currently on view at Longhouse Reserve Sculpture Garden in East Hampton, New York and at the Shepherd Art Center in Detroit, Michigan.

A New Orleans native, John H. Lawrence was responsible for building the extensive photographic holdings at HNOC, where he worked for 46 years before retiring as director of museum programs at the end of 2020. As HNOC’s head of curatorial collections, Lawrence oversaw holdings numbering more than half a million items. He has written and lectured widely about contemporary and historic photography and about the administration and preservation of pictorial collections, and he has curated dozens of exhibitions on a wide range of photographic, artistic, and general historical topics. His latest publication is the HNOC book Louisiana Lens: Photographs from the Historic New Orleans Collection.