DEVON DIKEOU
Conceptual Artist. Curator. Collector. Editor. Publisher.
1963-2026
I never think people die. They just go to department stores.
Andy Warhol
Original Downtown Cool Girl
The following photos of Devon Dikeou were taken by Neil Goldblatt in a single afternoon in downtown Denver in 1995.
In 2016, Dikeou wrote her own obituary as a conceptual art piece intended for use as a professional bio as well as to draft her actual obituary as she wished it to be appear in The New York Times.
Read the self-authored obituary that ran in The New York Times here.
We look at that glitter, hoping it stays permanent. “All that glitters is gold” right . . . But that glitter from a second ago will float . . . As glitter does, and become slightly lost in the diaspora of life. Invisible, I know the invisible, the back door, the place uninhabited, the forgotten and yet treasured . . . The land of misfit toys . . . to which I most belong.
Devon Dikeou
a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose . . .*
Instead of traditional floral arrangements, the artist left instructions for one of her most notable works, Please, to be restaged.
Left to right: the original still life painting, oil on canvas, by Édouard Manet; the painting recreated in a photograph by Devon Dikeou; Dikeou’s photograph recreated in a floral arrangement by the artist’s family at the celebration of life at Clyfford Still Museum that followed the memorial services.
“Please” is a photographic series recreating the last sixteen paintings that Edouard Manet painted as he was dying of syphilis. Manet’s sixteen paintings were diminutive in size and each depicted a bouquet of fresh flowers in glass vases. For the photographic series, each vase has been remade by hand by a glass blower, and each flower arrangement has been meticulously researched, reproduced, and replicated flower by flower, stem by stem, bloom by bloom and photographed in the same position that each rests in Manet’s original paintings. Further, the photographs have then been enlarged to the exact dimensions of the existing Manet paintings. For the exhibition the hand blown vases are displayed on plinths, empty and as objects in and of themselves. The blooms of the flowers used in the photo shoot have been dried and each bouquet’s fillings have been placed in empty Pace Picante jars. The title is extrapolated from Peter Schjeldahl’s essay, “Edouard Manet”, in which he describes the painter as a man who simply wanted to please the viewing public while at the same time tackling subjects as diverse or interconnected as wealth, remembrance, love, sex, death, loss. The piece aims to play on ideas of “please”, both pleasure and its instructive salutation, at the same time it questions the roles of sponsor, collector, artist, viewer, context.
Devon Dikeou
Artist’s Statement