She is one of a small group of groundbreaking women, including Alice Aycock, Jackie Ferrara and Mary Miss, who pushed sculpture toward the domain of architecture in the early 1970s.
“When Donna Dennis created her earnest, plain-spoken Tourist Cabins at the outset of her career,” writes Deborah Everett in Sculpture Magazine, “they had the impact of cultural icons.”[1] Drawing from overlooked fragments of rural and urban vernacular American architecture—tourist cabins, hotels, subway stations, roller coasters—Dennis represents stopping places on the journey through life.
During her time in Paris, which was not yet fully rebuilt after WWII, Dennis came to appreciate the ways a building could tell a story through layers of paint and centuries-old alterations revealed.
[4] When she moved back to New York in the late 1960s, Dennis worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art as a secretary in the fundraising department.
Inspired by painters such as Edward Hopper, Giorgio de Chirico, Henri Matisse, René Magritte, Charles Burchfield, and Jim Dine, and photographers such as Eugene Atget, Walker Evans, Berenice Abbott, and Wright Morris, these three-dimensional, false-front works were a stepping point beyond Dennis’s earlier paintings.
[6]For Dennis, descending into the subway opened up an underground world of travel, infinite possibilities, and unknown, distant destinations.
Dennis submitted Station Hotel for a New York Creative Artists Public Service grant and won in the category of painting.
Moving away from the false front hotels, Dennis began making work with interior space, reflecting not only her own growing sense of empowerment, but that of women more broadly.
[4]Building these new more complex structural works presented its challenges to Dennis, yet she was resourceful in finding materials and teaching herself carpentry skills.
[4] Two Stories with Porch (for Robert Cobuzio) was inspired by a small building, built as a toll booth, which stood at the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, and a rowhouse in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, photographed by George A. Tice.
Deeply affected by the second-wave feminist movement, Dennis imagined Deep Station to be a place in the center of the Earth where the tectonic plates were realigning, representing a shift of consciousness on a large scale.
Built of wood, acrylic, paint, glass, metal, and light fixtures, the work also incorporated a looped audio track of a roller coaster to enhance the experience.
Coney Night Maze represents thirteen years of labor under the shadow of 9/11 and in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, which washed away the portion of the Cyclone that inspired the work.
Inspired by a structure on the shores of Lake Superior, the work incorporates gouache paintings and small-scale dioramas of a small, pale house with pipes and cables reaching out into a large and formidable darkness.
The work places the viewer in a darkened gallery under a night sky, near what appears to be a giant ore dock, a familiar site on the shores of Lake Superior.
The work builds on Dennis’s earlier explorations of industrial architecture and her interest in metaphorical stopping places on the journey through life.
[15] Dennis expanded on many of the themes in Coney Night Maze in a series of dioramas (2001–2005) that incorporate constellations, rocks, and houses, exhibited at FiveMyles Gallery in 2005.
[16] Dennis's 2023 installation Ship/Dock/Three Houses and the Night Sky (2021–2023) at Private Public Gallery expanded her exploration of the ore dock begun with Ship and Dock/Nights and Days or The Gazer.
Donna Dennis: Poet in Three Dimensions contextualizes Dennis’s work within contemporary art and the women’s movements and traces the arc of her career, tracing the evolution of her architectural sculpture over more than forty years, exploring her artistic collaborations with poets, and presenting her most recent work, a series of gouaches and dioramas, for the first time.