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Donna Dennis (born 1942, Springfield, Ohio) is an American sculptor, painter, and printmaker. 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.” 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.

Dennis lived and worked in Manhattan in a Tribeca loft from 1973-2019. She now lives and works in Germantown, New York.

Early life

Dennis went to public school in Ohio and Washington D.C. before her family moved to Rye, New York in 1949. From a young age, Dennis loved drawing. She remembers drawing half a house in the first grade and insisting to her teacher that the other half was invisible. Her childhood experience making tree houses and forts also informed her later work. She went to Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, where she majored in studio art and focused on painting.

After college, Dennis went to Paris with friend and classmate Martha Diamond to study at Roger Barr's program at the American Center in Paris. 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.

When she moved back to New York in the late 1960s, Dennis worked at the Whitney Museum as a secretary in the fundraising department. By night, Dennis attended classes at the Art Students League. Through Peter Schjeldahl, a Carleton classmate, she met poet Ted Berrigan, who became her mentor and romantic interest. In the late 1960s, she turned from painting to three-dimensional work.

1970s

Dennis began making painted hotel facades, which she thought of as shaped canvases, in the early 1970s. In 1973, she had her first solo show, Hotels, at West Broadway Gallery in New York. Inspired by painters such as Hopper, De Chirico, Matisse, Magritte, Burchfield, and 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. Dennis placed the hotels so they all faced forward and installed theatrical lighting and summer night sounds to create a tropical setting, making this an early example of installation art.

"So much has been lost to the world in dismissing the gifts of, and the voices of, women. I wanted to be a part of discovering and bringing that voice to the fore and making sure it would never again be lost or silenced .... My work is a lot about getting people to find beauty in places they might have overlooked or dismissed, just as women's lives have been overlooked and dismissed."

Dennis's first subway work, 'Station Hotel', 1973-4 was included with the hotel works. Dennis recalls being on a subway platform when she noticed a door,

But it seemed a doorway that just opened to a blank wall. . . It was like a false doorway that only your imagination could take you beyond.

For Dennis, descending into the subway opened up an underground world of travel, infinite possibilities, and unknown, distant destinations. 'Station Hotel' features tile-patterned painted walls and two light sources: a fluorescent tube outside the doorway and an incandescent light inside. Dennis submitted 'Station Hotel' for a New York Creative Artists Public Service grant and won in the category of painting. 'Subway with Lighted Interior', completed in 1975, was Dennis's first freestanding sculpture. 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. 'Subway with Lighted Interior' features a small doorway over three steps, one with a vent embedded into it, implying a tunnel below. 'Subway with Lighted Interior' was also Dennis's first work that included elements that resembled rivets and steel columns, though the work is made of wood and masonite. She carried the subway’s industrial architecture into some later works as well.

Dennis's 'Subway with Yellow and Blue' (1975) was also a freestanding, three-dimensional structure. According to Dennis:

I began with the idea of making a stairway that went up in the front but was blocked off at the top, and, on the same diagonal, a stairway that went down in the back and seemed to go somewhere. As I worked on the piece I became aware that it bore a resemblance to small mausoleums, especially those I saw in a cemetery in New Orleans. I began to think of it as a dream house, with a basement, hidden passageways, secret rooms, and a subterranean life. The feeling grew in me that what I was making was the small, visible surfacing of something vast, hidden, unknown, and perhaps powerful.

Building these new more complex structural works presented its challenges to Dennis, yet she was resourceful in finding materials and teaching herself carpentry skills.

At this time, Dennis began turning to her own experiences as a source for her work. She remembered family road trips and the nightly ritual of looking for a place to stay. She was also looking closely at Walker Evans photographs, including “Cottage at Ossining Camp.” Dennis traveled to Maine to photograph tourist cabins, which inspired 'Tourist Cabin Porch (Maine)'. The work features a small porch, standing only 78+1⁄2 in (199.4 cm) tall. Inside the porch, which glows softly from within, a door and window are visible, with light softly glowing from within. There is no door from the porch to the outside, which is not immediately noticeable. This type of tourist cabin is reminiscent of a time when automobile ownership became common for middle class families. Taking to the roads, they sought overnight accommodations along the way.

In 1975, the prominent art collector Holly Solomon, introduced to Dennis by Denise Green, opened her gallery at 392 West Broadway in Soho and invited Dennis to show her work there. Dennis exhibited Tourist Cabins and Subway Stations at Holly Solomon Gallery in 1976, including 'Tourist Cabin Porch (Maine)' and 'Tourist Cabin Pensacola'.

'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. The work is dedicated to Dennis’s friend, Robert Cobuzio, who died while she was making the work. The piece was exhibited at the Whitney Biennial in 1979 and at Holly Solomon Gallery in 1980, alongside 'Tunnel Tower' (1979-80), which combined vernacular architecture such as that of a White Castle hamburger stand and the fantasy of a tower or fortress.

Recent Work

During 1997 Dennis unveiled Coney Island Maze (originally named Coney Island Underbelly). At the time of debut, Coney Island Maze was Dennis' largest piece to date at 12½ by 27 by 19 feet, and made of wood, acrylic, paint, glass, metal, and light fixtures. Inspired by Dennis' childhood experiences with the maze-like entranceway to the Coney Island Cyclone roller coaster, the piece took users through a turnstile, several sets of steps and walkways to a set of wooden tracks and red metal rails, as well as incorporated a looped audio track of a rollercoaster to enhance the experience. The work, like the name, perpetually evolved during the 12 years (1997-2009) it was on display at the gallery at the Neuberger.

Awards, grants and fellowships

Dennis is the recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2016, 2009, 2005, 2001), the Harpo Foundation Grant (2013), the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture (1994, 1986, 1980) the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting (1992), the New York Creative Artists Public Service Grant (1981, 1975) and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Sculpture (1979), among others. In 2015 she was awarded the Anonymous Was A Woman Award, in 2014 she received the Award of Merit Medal for Sculpture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 2008, the Malvina Hoffman Artist Fund Prize and Daniel Chester French Award for Sculpture from the National Academy Museum and School. Her public art designs have earned her several awards including the Bard Award of Merit in Architecture and Urban Design from The City Club of New York (1989), the Community Service Award for Excellence in Urban Design from the Parks Council of New York (1989) and the Award for Excellence in Design from The Art Commission of the City of New York (1987). In 2010 Dennis was elected to the National Academy in 2010.

References

1. Everett, Deborah (June 2006). "Home Away From Home". Sculpture. 25 (5): 44–49. Retrieved 21 September 2020.
2. Miller, Nicole (April 2019). "Room of One's Own: Donna Dennis and Downtown's Vanishing Lofts". Art in America. Retrieved 21 September 2020.
3. ^ Riley, Jan (2012). "Donna Dennis: Reimagining an American Vernacular". Woman's Art Journal. 33 (2): 11–19. Archived from the original on 2015-04-02.
4. Dennis, Donna. "False Front Hotels". Donna Dennis Art. Retrieved 21 September 2020.
5. Fitzpatrick, Tracy (2009). Art and the Subway: New York Underground. Rutgers University Press. ISBN 978-0813544526.
6. Dennis, Donna. "Subway with Lighted Interior". Donna Dennis Art. Retrieved 21 September 2020.
7. Dennis, Donna. "Tunnel Tower". Donna Dennis Art. Retrieved 21 September 2020.
8. ^ "Donna Dennis - Art in America". Art in America. Retrieved 2018-03-10.

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See also

• Everett, Deborah (June 2006). "Home Away From Home". Sculpture. 25 (5).

External links

Official website

1. Marshall, Richard (1981). Developments in recent sculpture. Whitney Museum of American Art. ISBN 978-0874270334.

• 1942 births
• Living people
• American sculptors
• 20th-century American women artists