photo credit: Enrico Brunetti
Research
Recent career
Major projects (selected)
The Emergence Room Podcast
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Estate of Tameka Jenean Norris, Transform Any Room, Des Moines Art Center
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Legacy as Wikipedia Page, Tameka Norris
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Still (a) Life, video
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Embodied Research, Iowa Arts Council Award
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a eulogy: By(e), Tameka!, video
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Solo exhibitions (selected)
Black Body, Ancient City, Murate Art District, Florence, Italy
Breach of Confidentiality, Walter Maciel Gallery
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Talk Back, Chapter One: Estate, Charles Allis Museum
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Grief Portraits, Dora Maar Residency, Menerbes, France
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Second Line, Illinois State University
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The Estate of Tameka Jenean
Norris, Figge Museum
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Laissez les Bon Temps Rouler, Galerie PJ, Metz, France
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Group Exhibitions (selected)
30X30, Jane Lombard Gallery, NY
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Made in the Plains, Joslyn Museum of Art, Omaha, NE
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Expo Chicago, Jane Lombard Gallery
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Transform Any Room, curated by Laura Burkhalter, Des Moines Art Center
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Echoes of Paradise, Jane Lombard Gallery
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Dirty South @ Virginia Museum of Fine Art, curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver
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Queer Threads, curated by John Chaich, San Jose Museum of Textiles and Quilts.
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On the road: chocolate cities @ TONE, curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah
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Gay Guerilla,
curated by Arcade Project Curatorial
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Recent press
American Academy in Rome, Martyrs, Vessels, and Perpetual Becoming (April 15, 2025)
MIU doctoral student T.J. Dedeaux-Norris wins Prestigious Prize (MIU News, October 25, 2025)
Dedeaux-Norris Wins Prestigious Rome Prize (Daily Iowan, May 6, 2025)
T.J. Dedeaux-Norris at Walter Maciel Gallery, Artillery Magazine, January 17, 2025
T.J. Dedeaux Norris: A Journey Through Art and Identity, Sixty Inches From Center, (November 21, 2024)
T.J. Dedeaux-Norris's Medium is Healing (Hyperallergic, June 27, 2023)
'Blackness is many things': Meka Jean breaks down 'partitions of Identity' in Visual LP, Little Village, (March 4, 2021)
Holland Kotter: Art Meets Its Soundtrack in 'Dirty South' (New York Times, July 15, 2021)
How T.J. Dedeaux-Norris turns exploitation on its head (Little Village, August, 2020)
American Academy in Rome, Martyrs, Vessels, and Perpetual Becoming (April 15, 2025)
MIU doctoral student T.J. Dedeaux-Norris wins Prestigious Prize (MIU News, October 25, 2025)
Dedeaux-Norris Wins Prestigious Rome Prize (Daily Iowan, May 6, 2025)
T.J. Dedeaux-Norris at Walter Maciel Gallery, Artillery Magazine, January 17, 2025
T.J. Dedeaux Norris: A Journey Through Art and Identity, Sixty Inches From Center, (November 21, 2024)
T.J. Dedeaux-Norris's Medium is Healing (Hyperallergic, June 27, 2023)
'Blackness is many things': Meka Jean breaks down 'partitions of Identity' in Visual LP, Little Village, (March 4, 2021)
Holland Kotter: Art Meets Its Soundtrack in 'Dirty South' (New York Times, July 15, 2021)
How T.J. Dedeaux-Norris turns exploitation on its head (Little Village, August, 2020)
research statement
My research examines how bodies carry history, how identity is constructed under pressure, and how artistic practice can become a site for integration, transformation, and the production of new knowledge. Working across painting, drawing, printmaking, performance, video, installation, and social practice, I use the body as both subject and method. My work moves between autobiography and collective history, asking how race, gender, power, memory, authority, and belonging become inscribed upon bodies and how those inscriptions might be disrupted, reorganized, or reclaimed.
For much of my practice, I have worked through fragmentation. I have used doubling, masking, repetition, performance, material accumulation, and multiple artistic personas to examine the distance between how a body is experienced internally and how it is read externally. Rather than treating identity as fixed, I understand it as something continually negotiated among personal history, cultural inheritance, institutional structures, and relationships with others. The studio allows me to make those negotiations visible.
My 2025–26 Rome Prize residency at the American Academy in Rome marked an important expansion of this research. Living and working in Rome placed my body within a landscape saturated with monuments, ruins, museums, religious imagery, and Western art-historical narratives. I became increasingly interested in the question of what happens when a contemporary Black body enters spaces in which histories of power have been preserved, monumentalized, and repeatedly reproduced.
That inquiry resulted in Black Body Ancient City, a developing archive of approximately 120 acetone-transfer prints made through encounters between my body, photographic images, architectural surfaces, historical fragments, and the material textures of Rome. Transfer became both technique and conceptual structure. Images refuse to arrive intact. They smear, fracture, disappear, repeat, and leave residues. The instability of the transfer parallels my larger interest in history itself: what gets carried forward, what becomes distorted, what disappears, and what remains embedded in the surface.
My video work Making Art History extends these questions by considering the relationship between artistic production and the institutions that determine how art history is constructed. Rather than positioning myself outside that history, I deliberately place my body within it. The work asks who has historically been permitted to occupy the position of artist, subject, authority, and historical record, while simultaneously acknowledging the complicated position of producing this work from within institutions that participate in those histories.
Performance provides another research methodology. In Unsettled Matters, developed with Jefferson Pinder and presented at Centro Pecci in Prato, performance became a site for examining grief, inheritance, embodiment, and unresolved histories. Across these projects, the body is not simply represented. It functions as an instrument of research. Movement, duration, repetition, exhaustion, discomfort, humor, intimacy, and vulnerability produce forms of knowledge that cannot always be reached through language alone.
Alongside my studio practice, my doctoral research in transformational leadership and coaching has given me another vocabulary for questions that have long existed within my artwork. My dissertation, All Parts Forward: An Autoethnography of Congruence Across Fragmented Selves Under Pressure, investigates how apparently fragmented identities might move toward greater congruence without requiring difference to disappear. Through autoethnography, group relations, coaching, reflective writing, artistic practice, and embodied observation, I examine the relationship among internal authority, external perception, identity, leadership, and the body.
This research has shifted my understanding of fragmentation. Earlier work frequently asked how a divided self survives. My current work increasingly asks what becomes possible when those divisions are allowed to exist in relationship with one another. Integration, in this sense, does not mean becoming singular. It means developing the capacity to move among multiple histories, identities, roles, and forms of knowledge without abandoning parts of oneself in the process.
This shift has also expanded the boundaries of what I understand as an artistic research environment. Through my developing Emergence Room methodology, I am exploring how structures drawn from artistic practice, coaching, group relations, reflection, and facilitated conversation might create temporary spaces in which artists and other participants can observe themselves and the systems they inhabit. Here, facilitation itself becomes a creative medium. The studio expands from a physical room into a relational structure.
My future research brings these trajectories together. I am developing new work from the archive produced in Rome while continuing to investigate the relationships among the Black body, historical space, institutional authority, memory, and representation. At the same time, I am interested in creating installations, performances, gatherings, and participatory structures that move viewers from observing questions of identity and power toward experiencing themselves within those questions.
I am particularly interested in what happens when artistic practice becomes both object and container: something that can produce images and performances while also creating conditions for encounter, reflection, experimentation, and transformation. This direction allows my studio practice, leadership research, teaching, and facilitation to remain distinct while informing one another.
Across these forms, a central question persists: How do we carry all of our parts forward?
For me, that question is simultaneously autobiographical, formal, historical, and collective. My research continues to examine what bodies inherit, what institutions preserve, what relationships reveal, and what artistic practice makes possible when we refuse to leave fragments of ourselves outside the room.
For much of my practice, I have worked through fragmentation. I have used doubling, masking, repetition, performance, material accumulation, and multiple artistic personas to examine the distance between how a body is experienced internally and how it is read externally. Rather than treating identity as fixed, I understand it as something continually negotiated among personal history, cultural inheritance, institutional structures, and relationships with others. The studio allows me to make those negotiations visible.
My 2025–26 Rome Prize residency at the American Academy in Rome marked an important expansion of this research. Living and working in Rome placed my body within a landscape saturated with monuments, ruins, museums, religious imagery, and Western art-historical narratives. I became increasingly interested in the question of what happens when a contemporary Black body enters spaces in which histories of power have been preserved, monumentalized, and repeatedly reproduced.
That inquiry resulted in Black Body Ancient City, a developing archive of approximately 120 acetone-transfer prints made through encounters between my body, photographic images, architectural surfaces, historical fragments, and the material textures of Rome. Transfer became both technique and conceptual structure. Images refuse to arrive intact. They smear, fracture, disappear, repeat, and leave residues. The instability of the transfer parallels my larger interest in history itself: what gets carried forward, what becomes distorted, what disappears, and what remains embedded in the surface.
My video work Making Art History extends these questions by considering the relationship between artistic production and the institutions that determine how art history is constructed. Rather than positioning myself outside that history, I deliberately place my body within it. The work asks who has historically been permitted to occupy the position of artist, subject, authority, and historical record, while simultaneously acknowledging the complicated position of producing this work from within institutions that participate in those histories.
Performance provides another research methodology. In Unsettled Matters, developed with Jefferson Pinder and presented at Centro Pecci in Prato, performance became a site for examining grief, inheritance, embodiment, and unresolved histories. Across these projects, the body is not simply represented. It functions as an instrument of research. Movement, duration, repetition, exhaustion, discomfort, humor, intimacy, and vulnerability produce forms of knowledge that cannot always be reached through language alone.
Alongside my studio practice, my doctoral research in transformational leadership and coaching has given me another vocabulary for questions that have long existed within my artwork. My dissertation, All Parts Forward: An Autoethnography of Congruence Across Fragmented Selves Under Pressure, investigates how apparently fragmented identities might move toward greater congruence without requiring difference to disappear. Through autoethnography, group relations, coaching, reflective writing, artistic practice, and embodied observation, I examine the relationship among internal authority, external perception, identity, leadership, and the body.
This research has shifted my understanding of fragmentation. Earlier work frequently asked how a divided self survives. My current work increasingly asks what becomes possible when those divisions are allowed to exist in relationship with one another. Integration, in this sense, does not mean becoming singular. It means developing the capacity to move among multiple histories, identities, roles, and forms of knowledge without abandoning parts of oneself in the process.
This shift has also expanded the boundaries of what I understand as an artistic research environment. Through my developing Emergence Room methodology, I am exploring how structures drawn from artistic practice, coaching, group relations, reflection, and facilitated conversation might create temporary spaces in which artists and other participants can observe themselves and the systems they inhabit. Here, facilitation itself becomes a creative medium. The studio expands from a physical room into a relational structure.
My future research brings these trajectories together. I am developing new work from the archive produced in Rome while continuing to investigate the relationships among the Black body, historical space, institutional authority, memory, and representation. At the same time, I am interested in creating installations, performances, gatherings, and participatory structures that move viewers from observing questions of identity and power toward experiencing themselves within those questions.
I am particularly interested in what happens when artistic practice becomes both object and container: something that can produce images and performances while also creating conditions for encounter, reflection, experimentation, and transformation. This direction allows my studio practice, leadership research, teaching, and facilitation to remain distinct while informing one another.
Across these forms, a central question persists: How do we carry all of our parts forward?
For me, that question is simultaneously autobiographical, formal, historical, and collective. My research continues to examine what bodies inherit, what institutions preserve, what relationships reveal, and what artistic practice makes possible when we refuse to leave fragments of ourselves outside the room.
full portfolio
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