T.J. Dedeaux-Norris, Mixed-media Artist and Associate Professor/Area Head, School of Art and Art History, University of Iowa
Wednesday, March 6, 2024, 5:30 PM EST
via YouTube Live
Co-hosted by Associate Professor Clarissa Ceglio and Digital Media and Design Students Pablo Gonzalez Miranda and Milan Pranger
Tameka Jenean Norris is, was, an academic American artist who found her identity as an artist specifically through the community college experience [with] hurricane Katrina in 2005 being sort of a marker for when Tameka's work arrived." - TJ Dedeaux-Norris
With the backdrop of the Figge Art Museum and the solo exhibition, 'The Estate of Tameka Jenean Norris', TJ Dedeaux-Norris delivers a home going for the persona Tameka Jenean.
LEARN MORE AND REGISTER: https://dmd.uconn.edu/major/diverse-perspectives/diverse-perspectives-tj-dedeaux-norris/
WHO IS T.J. DEDEAUX-NORRIS, FKA TAMEKA JENEAN NORRIS, AKA MEKA JEAN?
My embodied practice extends beyond the studio where I develop performances, edit video, sew textiles, assemble installations, and paint into a life-wide investigation of the interformativity of individual and collective identities and how that manifests in the body and its labor over time. I experiment with physical, mental, and spiritual modalities, from boxing to chiropractic to cognitive behavioral therapy, to test their conceptual and technical impacts on my work. Here, healing becomes its own media, visceral and tangible, as I seek to reconcile the seemingly oppositional past and present - rapper and contemporary artist, sexworker and university professor, runaway and mother’s caretaker - to highlight the necessarily generative nature of difference. In accord with the Black Feminist tradition, the only thing I cannot afford is dichotomy. This ethos is perhaps most obvious in the development and performance of my three personas: Tameka Jenean Norris, Meka Jean, and T.J. Dedeaux-Norris. In my 2020 solo exhibition at Figge Art Museum in Davenport, IA, “T.J. Dedeaux-Norris Presents the Estate of Tameka Jenean Norris,” I laid the oldest of them, Tameka, to rest
About the Diverse Perspectives in Digital Media & Design 2024 Speaker Series
To paraphrase James Baldwin, nothing can be changed until it is faced. This is certainly true of the inequities that have historically shaped digital media content, fields, and careers. Join UConn’s Digital Media & Design department in welcoming industry professionals, artists, and media scholars from the film, design, cultural, game, and other sectors to discuss how issues of equity manifest in their work, creative processes, and professions, allowing us to reflect on how our own practice can support greater equity, diversity, and inclusion.
For more information, contact: Meredith Freidman/DMD at meredith.friedman@uconn.edu