T.J. Dedeaux-Norris

With herself as her subject, T.J Dedeaux-Norris uses painting, video, photography, music, performance, and installation to explore the internal drives and external influences that shape identity. She came to art through music, which informs her practice. In addition to making her own music videos, full of tongue-in-cheek hip-hop posturing and songs about her identity as an artist and an African-American woman, she samples and mixes materials liberally in her other works. These range from paintings on patterned bed sheets of her New Orleans neighborhood destroyed by Hurricane Katrina to photographs of herself enacting black stereotypes to visceral performances centered upon the act of licking. In her work, as in life, Norris constantly re-invents herself, claiming: “Just as the city of New Orleans and places on the Gulf Coast struggle with progress and change, so do I as a person.”

T.J. Dedeaux-Norris (b. 1979, Guam) earned her MFA from Yale University (2012). She is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Iowa. Her work has been exhibited at venues including the Charles Allis Museum, Wisconsin (2023); Figge Art Museum, Iowa (2022); Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Virginia (2021); Trout Museum of Art, Wisconsin (2021); University Galleries of Illinois State University, Illinois (2021); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas (2021); Hirshhorn Museum of Art, Washington, D.C. (2018); Krannert Art Museum, Illinois (2017); Hillard Art Museum, Louisiana (2016); Museum of Contemporary Diasporian Arts, New York (2014); Northwestern University, Illinois (2013), and Contemporary Arts Museum, Texas (2012). Norris has been a resident at the Fountainhead Artist Residency, Miami; Grant Wood Fellowship, Iowa City, IA; Hermitage Artist Retreat, Sarasota, FL; Long Road Projects, Jacksonville, FL; MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH and OxBow School of Art in Saugatuck, MI.