BIO:
Elizabeth Denneau is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and art educator residing in the Sonoran Southwest. She obtained her teaching certificate and BFA in Art and Visual Culture Education through the University of Arizona and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a member of the Art21 Educators Institute and works with local community organizers, cultural workers, and colleges to develop practical models of social justice in art education. Her artistic practice involves ornate works that configure themselves into maximalist installations guided by her research into historical systems connected to respectability politics, its adjacency to White Supremacy and capitalism, and the duality of its effectiveness in the survival or dismantling of a people. She is the recipient of the 2024 WESTAF Bipoc Artist Award, MOCA Tucson Nightbloom Artist Grant, and the Arts Foundation of Southern Arizona’s 2024 stART: New Works Grant. She co-founded the Southwest Black Artists Collective and The Projects- art space located in Tucson, AZ. Both organizations serve a mission to bring visibility and support to Black creatives in the Southwest region.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
In my artistic practice, I am continually influenced by narratives of human perseverance, societal class systems, vulnerability, and power dynamics. I work in a number of mediums, utilizing techniques and inspiration from my time as a fashion designer. My current fascination is a series of sculptures that I have assembled, reworked, redesigned, and embellished from found objects and various other materials. These objects call to me in the aisles of thrift stores, antique shops, yard sales, and ancestral homes. They tell me when and where they belong and often become the base of the work.
These sculptures manifest around the unspoken, buried, and erased histories of the Black diaspora, my life as a biracial Black woman, and the systems of racism that are foundational to our world and their reverberations throughout generations into modern culture. I am also interested in unearthing my ancestors and bringing them into this contemporary conversation. In some way, I collaborate with them through my research and artmaking, interpreting their stories. I am curious about the idea of a collective ancestry and generational memory. I feel that I’m tied to the work and am always searching for modes of communicating and educating myself and others about the past.
Art-making with history and ancestry is a fluid act, often with throughlines that are not fully revealed until much later in the process. I must remain open because this is what dictates the materials used. This is an ongoing challenge and adventure as I learn to take the back seat to my muses and develop a visual language to tell their stories as well as mine.
