Donna Dennis ’64 is busier than ever. At 82, her art is the subject of a new monograph by Monacelli. She showed her new sculpture last spring at Private Public Gallery in Hudson, New York, a town fast becoming a locus for compelling contemporary art. Her book, Writing Toward Dawn, Selected Journals 1969–1982, came out in April. A film on her work, The Art of Metaphor, debuted at Le FIFA, an international film festival in Montreal, in March. And, to top it all off, the artist had a recent show at O’Flaherty’s, a New York City gallery that is the very acme of edgy, Lower East Side au courant.
While the recent flurry of activity is somewhat concentrated, unlike a lot of women artists who do not get their proper due in a timely manner—if at all—Dennis has been in the public eye for most of her career. Even before Holly Solomon asked Dennis to join her transformative gallery in 1975, Dennis had been very much on the scene.
She studied painting at Carleton and fell in with a group of fellow Carleton creatives—Peter Schjeldahl ’64, poet and longtime art critic for The New Yorker; Schjeldahl’s first wife, writer Linda O’Brien ’64; and painter Martha Diamond ’65. The quartet decamped to Paris for a year, and then to New York City. “They all took me out to events in New York, part of Peter’s downtown scene around the poetry events at St. Mark’s Church,” Dennis recalls.
Switching from painting to sculpture in New York, Dennis went on to create art that re-envisioned architecture through a feminist lens, work that cut across the grain of an abstemious minimalism that ruled the day in the 1970s. “The women’s movement came along and I thought, ‘I don’t have to follow all this male art history.’ I was curious what women would do on their own, and what kind of visual language we would develop,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘I can do whatever I want.’”
Dennis looked back to move forward. “I was inspired by games I played when I was little. I built tree houses or made an igloo out of snow. That was the most exciting thing that I did as a kid,” she recalls. “I thought, I’ll do that again. I’ll think about architecture.”
One of Dennis’ signal works is Cataract Cabin (1994), a quarter-scale house and porch with a cantilevered gangway supported by rickety spars. Perched above the viewer atop a massive sculptural boulder, it rests improbably on stacks of stones. With bare bulbs visible on the patio and interior, it at once evokes memory, mystery, and menace. “The interiors of my pieces always have a light on somewhere,” says Dennis. “That is very important.”
