Donna Dennis: Poet in Three Dimensions

The National Academy of Design presents a panel discussion with Donna Dennis, architectural sculptor and installation artist, to mark the publication of Donna Dennis: Poet in Three Dimensions.

Dennis: Poet in Three Dimensions, contextualizes Dennis’s work within contemporary art and the women’s movement, tracing the arc of her four decades long career and the evolution of her architectural sculpture.

The writer Nicole Miller will moderate the panel featuring Donna Dennis, visual artist and Academician, and contributors to the book, Academician Rackstraw Downes, visual artist, and Helaine Posner, Chief Curator at the Neuberger Museum of Art. The panel will be followed by a signing and cocktail reception with the artist.

PLEASE NOTE: RSVPs are encouraged. Seating is limited and will be first come, first served. Doors open at 5:30 pm. Can't attend?

The first monograph on the architectural sculptor and installation artist and long-time collaborator with the New York School poets.

Best known for creating large-scale installation work inspired by American vernacular architecture, Dennis finds beauty in places shaped by ordinary people, which become repositories for memory and feelings. Her seemingly familiar yet often darkly mysterious sites evoke memories, encourage reflection, and allude to the transient nature of life. This book 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.

A conversation between Dennis and painter Rackstraw Downes brings to life the artist’s influences through her own words. With insightful text by feminist art scholar Helaine Posner, plus commentary from Dennis on the sources and process of creating the work, this book is an essential addition to the libraries of collectors and art historians interested in the architectural sculpture movement of the 1970s, and all those interested in feminism in art.

Donna Dennis NA is one in a group of groundbreaking women—including Alice Aycock, Jackie Ferrara and Mary Miss—who pushed sculpture toward the domain of architecture in the early 1970s. Drawing from overlooked fragments of rural and urban vernacular American architecture, her sculptures—tourist cabins, hotels, subway stations, roller coasters—represent the stops along the way in our journeys through life.

Solo exhibitions of her work have been organized at The Brooklyn Museum, the Neuberger Museum, and the Sculpture Center, among others. A frequent collaborator, Dennis has worked with poets Anne Waldman, Kenward Elmslie, Daniel Wolff, and Ted Berrigan and with performance artist and puppeteer Dan Hurlin.

Dennis’s grants and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, several National Endowment Fellowships, and Pollock-Krasner Foundation grants. In recent years Dennis received the prestigious Artists’ Legacy Foundation Award, the Merit Award in Sculpture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award. She is Professor Emerita at Purchase College, SUNY, and lives and works in Germantown, New York.

Nicole Miller writes about art and culture for publications such as Art in America, The Art Newspaper, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, Lit Hub, and Guernica. She earned an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and has received fellowships and other support from the Milton Center at Seattle Pacific University, the Wassaic Project, the Marble House Project, and Creative Capital/The Andy Warhol Foundation. She teaches creative writing at New York University's School of Professional Studies.

Rackstraw Downes is a painter who was born in Kent, England in 1939. He depicts his surroundings, working always directly on site, whether outdoors, indoors, rural or urban. Often his paintings become extremely long, reflecting his turning attention as he scans the view.

Downes earned a BA from Cambridge University (1961) and a BFA and MFA from Yale University (1964). He has received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2009), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1988) and a National Endowment for the Arts Grant (1980). He was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1999). In 2014, Edgewise Press published a book collection of his writings on art , "Nature and Art Are Physical". Downes lives and works in New York City.

Helaine Posner is Chief Curator Emerita at the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, SUNY. Her exhibitions at the Neuberger Museum include Tomashi Jackson: Slow Jamz, Louise Fishman: A Retrospective, Dana Schutz: If the Face Had Wheels, and Tania Bruguera: On the Political Imaginary, each accompanied by an exhibition catalogue. From 1991 to 1998, she was Curator at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA. Posner is the author of a monograph on artist Kiki Smith and was US Co-commissioner for the 48th Venice Biennale, where she organized Ann Hamilton: Myein. Her upcoming book, Mothers of Invention: The Feminist Roots of Contemporary Art, written in collaboration with Eleanor Heartney, Nancy Princenthal, and Sue Scott, will be released in 2024.

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