2016-17 Grant Wood Fellow in Painting and Drawing and current University of Iowa faculty member, T.J. Dedeax-Norris, is included in "Gay Gorrilla," a survey exhibition containting new works in Queer abstraction by Arcade Project Curatorial. Queer art has enjoyed an explosion of discovery as the Contemporary art world has rejoined recent Queer abstraction with the activist and gender-themed work born in the early 1970’s. The visual essay of “Gay Guerrilla” builds on this premise, and also investigates the myriad of new divergent conversations which have stemmed from lesbian, transgender, queer, and queer artists of color embracing the fluid portal of abstraction. To bring to life this construct, Arcade Project Curatorial is presenting a rolling digital “artist film library,” with short video talks by the artists.
T.J. Dedeaux-Norris fka Tameka Jenean Norris was born in Guam and received their undergraduate degree at the University of California, Los Angeles before graduating with an MFA from Yale University School of Art. Dedeaux-Norris has recently participated in numerous exhibitions and festivals including at Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; Yerba Buena Museum, San Francisco, CA; Prospect.3 Biennial, New Orleans, LA; The Walker Museum, Minneapolis, MN; Performa 13; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX; The Studio Museum, Harlem, NY; Rotterdam Film Festival, Rotterdam,Netherlands; Sundance Film Festival, New York, NY; Mission Creek Festival, Iowa City, IA among many others. Dedeaux-Norris has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Fountainhead Residency, Grant Wood Colony Fellowship, The MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center and Yaddo. They are the 2017 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a 2018 National Endowment for the arts fellowship, a 2019-2020 Pollock-Krasner Foundation grantee and is currently tenure track Assistant Professor at University of Iowa.
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