[00:00:01] Donna Dennis: if I did my work,

[00:00:02] Donna Dennis: even if I never got a chance to show it,

[00:00:04] Donna Dennis: I would be carrying that spirit forward. And that gave me a purpose outside of myself.

[00:00:11] Donna Dennis: In a sense, do something important, even if I

[00:00:13] Donna Dennis: never succeeded to get a gallery or show even at all maybe, I would be doing something important that I believed in.

[00:00:22] Donna Dennis: And I realized I wanted to make art that would make your jaw drop. I wanted to have people come around the door and look in the room and just be stunned by what they saw. And I decided I couldn't do that with painting.

[00:00:40] Donna Dennis: and

[00:00:40] Donna Dennis: Somebody came up and said: Who made this? And I said, I did. And he said: A woman made this!? So it was also, the size and the, just yeah, women can do this. Women are doing this. So there was that.

[00:00:54] Donna Dennis: Somehow the money got mishandled . It wasn't there. I was already working on a new piece that I was excited about. And then they said well, we don't have the money, can you just carry on by yourself in there? I said, no, I can't do that. And they said then we'll have to cancel the show. And I thought, no.

[00:01:20] Welcome to the Installation Art podcast, the world's number one and only podcast about installation art, and the people who work with it.

[00:01:29] In this show, you will hear about the joys and challenges of the medium and get a behind the scenes look at the career and process of internationally renowned guests. I am your host, Anastasia Parmson.

[00:01:44] Today's guest is a true pioneer in contemporary sculpture. The New York Times nicknamed her a Heartland Grandmother of installation Art.

[00:01:56] Donna Dennis is a New York based artist who in the early seventies was part of a small group of groundbreaking women who pushed sculpture into the realm of architecture and installation. At a time when the art world was still dominated by minimalism and male artists working with industrial materials, Donna and her contemporaries carved out entirely new territory.

[00:02:21] Donna's work is in the collections of MoMA, the Met, Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian, and many others. She's exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial, Tate Gallery, and so much more. She's also received many fellowships and awards. But beyond the accolades, Donna Dennis helped define what installation art could be, decades before it became the prevalent medium it is today. So it is an absolute honor to bring you our conversation with Donna Dennis.

[00:03:00] Well, Thank you Donna, again for agreeing to come and do this. Your perspective is gonna be super valuable to our listeners, I'm sure. So where are you based actually?

[00:03:12] I'm, um, in the Hudson Valley, my post office is Germantown because the little hamlet I live in no longer has a post office, but I actually live in a little place called Clermont. And it used to be the estate, I think as far back as the late 1600s, there's a family that settled it, they came from Scotland, they built a mansion. I'm in that property that went back. So there's a very early school, um, some very early things here, a lot of history. And Robert Fulton invented the Steamboat and he called it Clermont because he was married to a member of that family. The Livingstons was their name. So I'm in a place now with a lot of history when I lived in New York City. Same thing, lower Manhattan, a lot of history.

[00:04:04] Hmm. Yeah. Okay. Well how about we start with some rapid fire, easy questions. First thing that comes to mind.

[00:04:16] I saw you did this with Petah Coin, right?

[00:04:19] Yeah.

[00:04:20] I usually do this with everyone.

[00:04:22] I don't remember the questions you asked Petah but Petah was also the person who connected you and me, I think. Is that right?

[00:04:29] Yeah.

[00:04:30] Yeah. I actually discovered your work by listening to one of her older interviews, and I was like, I better go check that out. Oh, cool. Yeah she's a great advocate.

[00:04:42] Yeah.

[00:04:43] Okay. On a scale of one to 10, how weird are you? One being not weird at all.

[00:04:51] Never been asked that question before. And it all, I'm sure it, in terms of my family when I was a young adult and I was extremely weird, but that was their standards.

[00:05:03] So

[00:05:03] Yeah.

[00:05:05] I'm a five or a six.

[00:05:06] Do you have a favorite quote?

[00:05:09] Yes. Virginia Woolf's from A Room of One's Own, the last part of that where she talks about Shakespeare's sister. It means the world to me. It meant the world to me when I took courage from it. And still I, I tear up when I read it.

[00:05:27] What's the quote?

[00:05:28] uh, I, you know, I'm not gonna do well. I mean, she was a wonderful writer. But the gist of it was Shakespeare had a sister. And she also wanted to write, and she came to London also. But she got pregnant. She died in childbirth. And so she died young and she never got to have a career that she dreamed of. But then Virginia Woolf in her lecture at Cambridge it's available on a video.

[00:05:59] And I also saw it live on stage in New York with, I'm not gonna remember her name, wonderful actress. But so she says, but she lives on, she lives in us. And then she talks something about how we're carrying her spirit forward. And someday it will return, so to speak. So that said to me that it didn't matter because I was very strong feminist of just discovering feminism and tremendously excited about it. And it was about all I could think about for a while.

[00:06:35] But so if I did my work, even if I never got a chance to show it, I would be carrying that spirit forward. And that gave me a purpose. Feminism did too purpose outside of myself. Outside of Donna Dennis wants to be an artist, but also it, I could succeed, in a sense, do something important, even if I never succeeded to get a gallery or show even at all maybe, I would be doing something important that I believed in. And that was tremendously exciting and empowering and liberating.

[00:07:13] Yeah. I love that. That's really wonderful sentiment and I'll have to, I'll have to look it up.

[00:07:20] Yeah. Yeah, it's just the last part. The whole thing is wonderful, but that last part really pulls it together so beautifully.

[00:07:28] What do you like to drink when working in your studio?

[00:07:32] I shouldn't say. I work at night usually. I became a night owl. That's where my

[00:07:39] journal book is called, writing Toward Dawn. Sometimes

[00:07:43] yes.

[00:07:43] I would be working and I'd turn around and I'd see that the light coming through the window, the sky was lavender, and I'd realized I'd worked till dawn.

[00:07:53] So what I liked to do when I was building the big constructions and being in the country makes you change your schedule some. But I still go to the studio earlier in the evening, but I don't work until dawn. But what I like to do, when I could back 20 years ago or something, I'd work in my studio.

[00:08:12] I'd work on the big installation, a lot of carpentry, table saws. I'd drink bubbly water and stuff like that. But then I would turn off all the lights and I'd get my journal out. And I'd really look at the piece and I'd write stream of consciousness, and I'd walk around the piece and I'd look and look and new ideas would come up. I'd noticed things that I hadn't noticed before. And a nice glass of white wine was the way I like to end the evening.

[00:08:44] Any specific kind of white wine?

[00:08:46] Yeah Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand was a favorite. And then at the point I discovered torrontes from Argentina and

[00:08:56] Okay.

[00:08:57] it was one night in a restaurant in New York, they said we don't have Sauvignon Blanc, but we do have torrontes, would you like to try it. And I loved it. But it's hard to get in this country. And the vineyard that made the torrontes that I really loved only now sells in Europe and maybe in your country and maybe Japan.

[00:09:18] Maybe not. In Australia. It's easy to get Australian and New Zealand wine and everything else is a little niche.

[00:09:28] Yeah. This,

[00:09:29] but it's fine. 'cause New Zealand wine is wonderful.

[00:09:32] Yeah,

[00:09:33] Do you like to listen to anything while working?

[00:09:36] yeah. Jazz.

[00:09:37] Hmm.

[00:09:39] Okay. Let's get into the meat of the story. Donna, tell me briefly what was it like growing up for you and how did you come to discover Art?

[00:09:53] Well, I go way back because I guess I loved to draw right from the start. And many kids are given crayons and stuff. And my family always made sure I had, and I have a sister a year younger, made sure that we had paper or my father brought back paper with discontinued address or something from his office.

[00:10:15] You flipped it over, you had a nice piece of white paper to, to draw on. So always did that and always had the supplies I wanted, kids supplies. But then I started to get attention for drawing, I guess first from my family, but then at school. And by the time I was six years old, I decided that's what I wanted to do.

[00:10:40] I was gonna be an artist. I had no idea what it meant in terms of a real lifestyle, but that's what I would tell people I was gonna be.

[00:10:49] How did you know it was even a career option? Was your family artsy or?

[00:10:55] Not at all. But we did go to, we went to a museum maybe once a year, something like that. But I remember my father looked at Jackson Pollock and said he, I had a sister, three years old at the time, and he said your sister could do that, your little sister. So they liked the impressionists but they weren't...

[00:11:17] so anyway, that was, but there weren't art books around the house, although there was one book that also was really important to me, which was engravings by Gustave Dore. And it was paradise lost. My grandparents had it. It was, and they were very religious people and we couldn't do anything. My sister and I, and then later I had two more sisters, but this was when my grandparents were alive and we lived with them. And my father was away in World War ii.

[00:11:45] Um, But I mean, the family did not cook on Sunday, we weren't supposed to do any kind of work on Sunday. So Sunday was really boring. And we went to church, Sunday school and then regular church and then family worship in the evening. But there was paradise lost and we weren't supposed to look at anything but Paradise Lost and National Geographic.

[00:12:08] And National Geographic was because family had missionaries. My grandmother had cousins or spent their lives in India, something like that. So you could see what the missionaries were working on by seeing what strange people lived in different parts of the world and needed enlightenment. And then Paradise Lost and Gustave Dore, you know, his work?

[00:12:32] Yeah.

[00:12:32] I looked and looked at that and I'm sure it influenced me

[00:12:36] So you went to study art and you studied painting. How did you then move into 3D work and installations from there?

[00:12:48] well. Actually, I'm gonna back up quickly and just say in high school, I had a wonderful art teacher who was seeing artists showed in New York City and her husband started the art education program at the Museum of Modern Art. Her name was Mabel Demico and I was really fortunate and she was really encouraging and she actually said to my mother, she said, Donna has everything it takes, she can go as far as she wants. And later when things were very discouraging and I was disheartened, and I would remember that. know, And it seemed like, well, she probably knew what she was talking about because she was sophisticated artist. So I chose a college that had an art studio, art program.

[00:13:33] Many didn't at that time. I started college in 1960. And many didn't have at that time. And also, actually the one I went to, Carleton College had a whole building, it was a small building, but it had a building for the studios, the art history and art. And that was really unique and that kind of sold me.

[00:13:56] But I was very discouraged there for the first three years. And then they changed the senior project requirement. And everybody was to do a painting and it was to be based on Shakespeare or the Bible.

[00:14:10] Oh really? Wow.

[00:14:13] And they would,

[00:14:14] that's not limiting at all.

[00:14:16] Yeah. And they would set up a still life and they'd choose the color palette and they'd do little corrections on your painting and.

[00:14:23] So it was basically mostly about learning skills and technique.

[00:14:29] There was one professor talked about Ben Shahn's The Shape of Content. So there was one person in composition and, you know, I came to understand that if the horizon was high, it sort of said one thing, if it was low, something else, things like that. So I had the beginnings of it. And then I went to Paris for a year and had a wonderful teacher there and I tried to paint. I loved the idea of being an abstract painter and I had nothing to do really that year but paint, it was great. The only year of my life like that.

[00:15:05] But. I could never finish the abstract painting, I would just change this, and then I'd change that. I'd change. I never knew how to resolve it. And I got very frustrated and one time I just decided I was gonna do the ugliest painting I could think of, and that was a self portrait with sunglasses on and my tongue hanging out in green. And I wrote rats across the top. And then I thought, this is the best thing I've done. So I realized I needed, I needed imagery.

[00:15:32] Yeah.

[00:15:33] I wasn't meant to be an abstract artist. As much as I liked looking at abstract paintings and looked like so much fun to do. So that was really important. And then I came back to New York, I went to the Art Students' League and continued to paint. But now I knew imagery was important to me. Then I was there for a year and then I shared a studio with Martha Diamond, a painter who's getting a lot of a attention. She went to Carleton also and we went to Paris together. Unfortunately she's no longer with us but her work is getting lots of wonderful attention.

[00:16:07] So it was the sixties, the mid to late sixties, there was pop art. And there were things like Claes Oldenburg doing something called The Store where you'd walk into a room and he had plaster food. And I once went to a party at his place also, in his loft. And there was a big table and it had like a real ham and then a plaster ham and it was full of like plaster food and real food. So there, there was that going on. And people were saying, you know, painting is dead, painting is dead, painting is dead.

[00:16:42] And

[00:16:42] oh yeah.

[00:16:43] yeah so, and I realized I wanted to make art that would make your jaw drop. I mean, I wanted some, even it was a painting or whatever I was doing. I wanted to have people come around the door and look in the room and just be stunned by what they saw. And I decided I couldn't do that with painting.

[00:17:06] and to keep myself going, I started to do collages, little collages, but then I started to do seven by 10 canvases. Because I was still kind of, I was still a painter. And I did one big painting, it was kind of an imaginary landscape. And there was a big cloud in the sky. It was sort of The canvas was divided in half with the sky, the upper part and the ground, the lower part. And there were some strange clouds in the sky. But on the lower part, I had a triangle, a dark triangle.

[00:17:45] And then I decided I wanted to... and I found a way to have somebody fabricate this for me. But I wanted the cloud to be able to escape out of the painting. And so this clear plastic cube was, I spray painted it purple, lavender, like a cloud, and I put it out in front of the canvas and then I put a piece of Mylar, like mirror behind it, another square on the canvas. And what I said to myself was if the box gets nervous about being out on the floor, if the cloud gets nervous, it'll be able to go back into the painting because the mirror will be its way going back into the painting.

[00:18:29] So that was my first step out onto the floor. And, And actually those big seven by 10 paintings or whatever, the big collages in a way, is what they were or assemblages, I had them sit on the floor and lean against the wall. So I was already out on the floor a little bit, and then I made this one piece with the box out on the floor.

[00:18:50] And the way I used mirrors, they were narrow strips and I just wanted them to catch the light but I didn't want people to be able to see themselves in it. But as you moved back and forth, the light reflected out of the mirrors would change. So in a way, I was just taking these tiny little steps and I did not know where they were taking me. But you know, Now it was something that as people moved around, it would change. And also big. Seven by 10 feet was pretty big. So, you know, Looking back now, I can see these were all tiny steps toward

[00:19:27] Yeah.

[00:19:28] and then I decided, there were shaped canvases. That was one thing that was going on in painting. So after doing those big, I call them imaginary walls, I felt lost again. But I started to do collages and drawings. And one time I did this drawing that I totally loved and it had like a ziggurat, kind of ziggurat sides um and a central door that stepped back so it was a simple shape And I, by now, I was a feminist, so I decided these were self-portraits. So I, I loved the drawing, I thought I really had a very strong feeling. I'd found what I'd been looking for in the previous years. And now I found it. Now, it wasn't gonna be just something in a drawing, but I was gonna make it.

[00:20:15] So I made these things I called False Front Hotels. Actually the first one I called a gate. And it was like going through... it had a mirror in the center, so, you know, Imagining you're entering another world. And I also remember that as a kid, a school trip or two to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, there was a mastaba in the Egyptian section. And they brought part of it over from Egypt. So you could actually go in a little door, but you ended up just at a blank wall and then you'd make a left because you could do that. But that didn't take you anywhere. But if you went that distance and then took another right then there was a false door, a narrow false door. So I was working with that too, that inspiration. And I loved that it was a door that took you to another world. And I guess I learned later it's um, cause I thought about taking you to an imaginary world, but for the Egyptians that false door was an interface between the world of the living and the world of the departed.

[00:21:27] So I was working with that too. But anyway. I made these hotels with these narrow openings. And then I got a chance to show in a co-op situation, and I knew right away that I wanted to make them be a village of hotels.

[00:21:42] I was also inspired by Jane Bawles' Two Serious Ladies. She had a story about two American women and she was eccentric. And her characters were eccentric, but it took place in Panama. And there was a description about walls that were painted green, and there were birds in bird cages hung throughout.

[00:22:04] So I was thinking about tropical too. And I had also seen Robert Wilson's my first thing I'd ever seen of Robert Wilson's basically stayed up all night and watched something. It was at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I think it was Deafman Glance, but he had an extremely decorated stage. And then some things could happen fast and some things would happen really slowly. And and he had palm trees and he had rocks and he had a little house and and many other things. And that was liberating. And that was an inspiration too. So when I had a chance to show the hotels, I decided to have four of them and to make paper palm trees. And I had a friend in theater. He said, you want it tropical, we'll set up the light in the back and they'll be shining toward people, but we'll angle 'em so it doesn't drive them crazy. But you know to give it a hot, tropical feeling. I had a little record player and I had a record of tropical bird calls. So I didn't know what I was... you know, I just knew I wanted that.

[00:23:10] Well,

[00:23:10] That was a, an installation,

[00:23:12] it was an, its later. I, oh, I did, I did an installation. But

[00:23:16] was that word even in the vocabulary of the art world back then?

[00:23:21] if it was, it was just barely. And I'm talking 1973, was that show. I mean, I called what I doing, if they weren't shaped canvases as they got to be more three dimensional I thought they were painted wooden constructions. But from the very start, my very first show, I always wanted sound, I wanted to think about the light. I wanted people to walk among the pieces and behind and to feel like they were in a magical place, I guess. So I think the term was environmental back then.

[00:23:57] Yeah.

[00:23:58] I think people talked about environmental, but they weren't talking about things having to do with global warming, they were talking about installations. If there were installations at the time at all. You know, there was Claes Oldenberg and his Store. But I guess he had created an environment, I think is the way people talked about it.

[00:24:17] Yeah. You touched on the subject of feminism briefly. I think that's a very important part of your career 'cause you were coming of age as an artist during a time when women weren't even mentioned in art history books and

[00:24:38] The art history book that I had in college, Janson's had no women. Everybody knows that now.

[00:24:43] Yeah. Yeah. And galleries were dominated by men making minimalist work. So what sustained you or what gave you the audacity to make the work you wanted to make and make it big and loud and bold?

[00:25:04] Maybe Virginia Woolf. But actually even when I was at the Arts Students League, I just, I dunno, I wanted do something that would make people get goosebumps. I just knew I wanted to do that. So I think I was always gonna do that.

[00:25:21] And my things were always quiet, it was crickets. It was either sounds of crickets or jungle bugs, and one critic in San Francisco really criticized my cricket sounds. Said they were very annoying. So I wanted to make a big impact. I just knew that. I would always say I wanted to make people's jaws drop.

[00:25:43] And when I went to the Arts students league, it was at night after my job and I would get my painting down out of the storage and put it on an easel and I wouldn't look at it. And I'd walk out of the room and then I'd prepare myself a little bit and I'd walk in and I wanted my painting to do something incredible for me. So I guess that's what I wanted do to anybody who looked at the work.

[00:26:10] Interesting way of doing it.

[00:26:14] And as I said I, I realized that I wasn't gonna do it with painting. So I did start to do these big assemblage things, the seven by 10 things. And yeah, and I think probably I felt like to make people's jaws drop, you had to do something that they hadn't seen before.

[00:26:32] And I did imagine with my little false front hotels, when I was drawing them, I imagined them in the woods. And I remember thinking, wouldn't it be great if I could just put these hotels out in the woods, or I could put my artwork out in the woods and people would just stumble on them and they would. they'd say, what is this? What? And they would look really closely and they'd walk around and ask themselves all kinds of questions. It wouldn't occur to them that it was art. It was something else that pulled them in and yeah, pulled them in, want them to stop and look and think and those things.

[00:27:12] Oh, and I was gonna say also about size, because I think it's really relevant today that I knew pretty early on that I I needed a loft, that's what artists, you know, the lofts were just beginning to be inhabited by artists and

[00:27:29] The thing you had to have as an artist?

[00:27:30] Yeah, that's, yeah. And they were just beginning, SoHo was still mostly manufacturing and um, but I think the fact that there were these great big spaces, raw spaces that artists moved into, really made it possible for a lot of people to think really big. Minimalists, I mean everybody to think really big.

[00:27:53] And I think it did that for me too.

[00:27:57] Mm-hmm.

[00:27:58] But I would say, now talking about my dream of having my pieces in the woods and having people just stumble on them and having trees around. I think that idea and that dream and that image in my head led to putting my hotels among paper palm trees. And, you know, I wanted to bring that woods with these strange things um, that people wouldn't think of art right away. They were just interesting things. I wanted to bring that inside.

[00:28:28] Yeah. So how did you manage to start showing those works?

[00:28:33] Okay, so by 1970, I'd found a loft that I rented and there were other artists in the building and one of them said to me um, there's something called, it was called 10 Downtown. So first I was invited by this group of artists, some of them in my building to show 10 downtown and that was something where we pooled our money to pay for a poster and, I don't know, reaching out to some papers or something. And people would come and visit our studios. So that's the first time I showed. So I got that experience. I set an early hotel up and I had one palm tree. But that probably helped me visualize what I wanted to do.

[00:29:19] And then the next year, some of those people in that 10 downtown thing then started a co-op in a space in SoHo. And I got the basement and a friend of mine got the upstairs. And that's where I did the first installation. Now, looking back, I call it that,

[00:29:39] Yeah and so you would invite people basically like a open studio?

[00:29:44] The previous year, the 10 downtown was open studio. This was in a co-op gallery where they, I dunno if we took turns sitting or they hired somebody to sit, but it was open hours like a gallery and it was in SoHo, which was the hot place to be.

[00:30:00] So, but I got a great review in art news at the time, so my first review. And it said: one of the wittiest and most beautiful shows of the season was Donna Dennis' Hotels. It was just a couple of lines, but I was ecstatic. And it was written by a poet and I probably can't remember his name now, but back in those days, a lot of poets wrote reviews and I think Art News tried to cover every show in the city. It was a much smaller art scene that everybody would get two or three lines at least.

[00:30:38] Wow. Those were the days!

[00:30:41] Now you have to look like a needle in a haystack to find anyone who writes about art.

[00:30:47] Yeah. Well, and the poets didn't get paid very much. They one who wrote my little review was Kara Henry. But there was in New York at the time, there was a big connection between poets and artists. At least some artists and some poets. Like Peter Schjeldahl the critic who was a classmate of mine at Carleton college. And he came to New York first to be a poet and he was in Paris with me and his first wife Linda and Martha Diamond.

[00:31:15] And then when we all came back to New York, there was this kind of scene ready for me, which was the poets around St. Mark's poetry project. And the first public exposure my work ever got was doing announcements for poetry readings.

[00:31:30] Okay. Is there a moment that you can point that was like the pivotal moment where changed or your career took off, or was it like a gradual buildup?

[00:31:44] it was pretty fast. Once I figured out what I wanted, I figured out what my imagery was, it was this architectural kind of direction. And I felt so sure that was what I've been looking for. And nobody could have taken away from me or told me it wasn't good. So there was that and then these two little chances to show, one year after the other year.

[00:32:08] And then, there were consciousness raising groups where I met more women artists and gave me energy and resolve and and a sense of purpose, as I said. And there was one artist, one painter in the group, And there, then there was a collector named Holly Solomon, she was well known as a collector.

[00:32:30] Andy Warhol painted her, Roy Lichtenstein had painted her. And and then she had started a little of a performance space, poetry, reading, art exhibition space in SoHo. And this friend of mine Denise Green said: do you want me to get Holly to your studio? And I said: sure! And so Denise got Holly to my studio and Holly came in saying Horace, that was her husband, Horace and I are gonna buy a country house and we're looking for art for our country house. And afterwards Denise said, that's it, that's it, they're gonna buy something! You know, Because Holly said, I wanna bring Horace back. And then you know, it was a matter of putting up the palm trees and taking him down and putting them up again.

[00:33:18] So Horace came with Holly on the second visit and and then they didn't buy anything and I was pretty annoyed. And then one evening I had a figure drawing group that was meeting at my place and I got a phone call and this voice said: Donna, this is Holly. Holly Solomon, I'm starting a gallery and I want you to be in it.

[00:33:41] That's what happened.

[00:33:44] And Holly being already a famous collector and one of the earliest galleries in soho, got a lot of attention. She got a lot of attention right away internationally. So that was 1975 when Holly invited me into her gallery. I didn't have a show till 76. A couple of women noticed that there were no women scheduled for the first year. But anyway, I got scheduled for fall of 76. By 77 I was in the Whitney Biennial.

[00:34:14] That was fast!

[00:34:16] in 1982, I was in the Venice Biennale and then again in 1984. So that was, there had been previously, I got to New York in 1965. So it had felt early, the early years like a slog and confusing and discouraging. But by 1970 things really started to... one thing, I had full-time jobs, I was working in publishing and and I changed to freelancing and that gave me a little more time in the studio and that helped a lot too. Then I lost my freelancing jobs and I was in desperate straits financially, but I had time.

[00:34:54] Yeah, reading your journals, it sounds like you just go to the studio every day like a job, and you have this very strong work ethic. I was like, does she have a day job or what?

[00:35:07] I think that's partly why I got into working at night because I always had a day job. And, 40 hour a week day job for seven years.

[00:35:16] Wow.

[00:35:16] And then so I had to work at night and yeah. And I didn't take a vacation. I turned my vacation time, into long weekends. So I gave myself three day weekends by not taking my two week vacation in the summer.

[00:35:31] But um, no. early in those days I was in the studio every night.

[00:35:37] Sounds quite exhausting actually.

[00:35:40] Yeah. I mean, editing the journal book, I was astonished at how much I did in one day sometimes. Working, coming home, doing something else and then going to three parties in a row or something like that.

[00:35:55] Mm-hmm.

[00:35:58] Or going to, going to a poetry reading and then going to I had that energy.

[00:36:03] Yeah. And did you build everything yourself?

[00:36:08] Yeah.

[00:36:09] Do you still build stuff now?

[00:36:12] From time to time I've had really good assistants. And often when I was working with a deadline. I guess the way it usually would go, I would need to work for a while on a piece by myself. A lot of it's figuring out the scale because I made those first hotels to be my height because I decided they were about me.

[00:36:32] So I have to play with the scale a lot. So, you know, go slowly and. Well Before the first Venice Biennale, Holly and Judy Pfaff and I were gonna be in the Venice Biennale, we were both under the impression that was the Venice, this was 1982, that Holly and this curator were talking about 1984.

[00:36:55] And then we all went out to dinner and the way they talked, Judy and I realized, oh no, this is April and they're talking about June, 1982. And I said to Holly, you know, I can't do it. You know, a piece takes its own time. Well, I basically said I can't do it, I have a job. She said: quit your job, i'll send you all the assistants you could use. So all of a sudden I had six or seven people working, people cutting up a piece of wood, putting aside while they went to the bathroom, coming back, somebody had taken that piece of wood and was using it for something else.

[00:37:30] I mean, it was kind of crazy and wonderful. But that was the first time that the work progressed at the same rate that my thinking did.

[00:37:40] That's rare!

[00:37:41] Yeah. It was pretty amazing. And that's when my work started to get really big. It doubled in size in two weeks, in a way that I hadn't thought it was going to. I'd sit, you know, with my glass of wine after everybody left. Sit and look, write in my journal, free-associate, those things. And I'd have a whole new list when everybody came in the next day. And then by the end of that day, they'd done all that and I'd pick up something else I wanted to happen. So that was an amazing time. Because as a carpenter, I mean, I, I never studied sculpture, I never studied architecture, I never studied carpentry. So I was very self taught. And, you know, my pieces are not made it fine carpentry, like... so long as it works. That's fine.

[00:38:32] What kind of skills did you have to learn to make your first works?

[00:38:37] Well, I had to learn how to make um... the seven by 10 stretchers I had made for me. Then after that, when I wanted to make the hotels, I decided to make my own. And I remember I was getting so frustrated, my friend Martha Diamond said, when she heard what was driving me crazy, was I couldn't get things square. And she said, oh, you just put it up in the corner of the door.

[00:39:03] And, so there were things like that I didn't know. And I would borrow a drill off my friend Rosemary, and I thought they cost like $200, but at one point she said, Donna, I think you could buy your own. And yeah, it cost $35 at the time or something like that. So I had a lot to learn, but.

[00:39:26] I also, because of the scale I work you know, I can't use a bulk door knob. I can't, you know, I have to figure out ways to make, so it's very mixed media. I had to learn how to do pipe bending. I wanted to have lights come out one piece on a, on a long tube and bend back and light the building. And I went up to Canal Street and I got plastic tubing and then I put part of it in my oven and tried to shape it that way.

[00:39:58] Of course, it collapsed. And then I told another friend about that, and he was, there were many artists back in those days, male artists who were supporting themselves by fixing up lofts for people. And so he knew what to do and he said, I'll bring over my pipe bender. So I learned about pipe bending. So I picked up skills like, you know, and the electrical work and, but I, I did all that myself, but

[00:40:25] Amazing.

[00:40:26] The important lessons from other people.

[00:40:28] Yeah. And are those older pieces, are they still alive and around? Did you manage to make them to a sort of archival standard?

[00:40:39] well, I, I did try to make things that would last. Like with the painting, I would use Masonite and I would gesso it, and then I used Liquitex pretty much. But I tried to make things that would... and my models, I just used pebble board in the beginning and then I decided to use you know, matboard that was archival to make them. And the way I envision things is usually I do a little painting or drawing first, and then I start to make models, just sort of tabletop sized models. And that was something I needed to learn early on.

[00:41:16] And I made, because after the hotels then I wanted, I wanted it to be that real space behind that door, and I saw it as myself getting, feeling bolder and more confident and as a metaphor for women's voice in the world and the affairs of people expanding and being heard more. So that was one metaphor I was working with more, more space.

[00:41:42] The first piece I made where I wanted it to have an inside I did a drawing of the front, I did a drawing of each side. I did a drawing of the back and I thought, this isn't really getting me where I need to be. And I made my first maquette, so it was something I could pick up, turn around, see how the different sides related in place.

[00:42:04] Do you always make a maquette for every piece you build? And how detailed are they? Are they basically your vision or is it's just a 3D sketch?

[00:42:15] Just a 3D sketch. It's a way to get started it. And I'm... when I'm working on a big piece, make another me head or two, like halfway in. And the piece may... It's just a way to get started

[00:42:29] You mentioned scale a couple of times. How do you figure out the scale? Is there like a specific mathematical formula you use or?

[00:42:39] No. So the first hotel, when I decided it was my self portrait and to get to that idea, I had to decide that women's lives were worthy of study. So I decided the first one would be my height which was five feet, eight and a half inches. And then I decided the top of the door would come to my eye level when I was standing. And that's a scale up since it's not mathematical, it's based on my body.

[00:43:08] okay. Even for the larger pieces, you're still basing it on that?

[00:43:13] Yeah. The ceiling in my place in the city was 12 feet tall, so I always wanted to go up as far as I could go. So sometimes on the second level, things might be shorter, you know, so I could get a whole second floor in as much as possible. But on the first level, it would always be that same thing here to here.

[00:43:36] Yeah, I mean your studio space must be massive.

[00:43:40] well I had to move. I had to leave the city in 2019. And I've been an activist to keep artists in their loft rental. But finally people in my building started to take buyouts and I couldn't fight myself. And I couldn't blame my neighbors for taking buyouts because we were all in our seventies. Some of them were struggling on the stairs, or they wanted to live closer to their kids. And the buyouts were something you could really do something with for the first time. we had a succession of landlords.

[00:44:10] But One thing I found out about the building was it was 75 feet wide, which is really unusual. Three lots and most loft buildingsi in New York are 25 feet wide. When I found that building and decided which floor, we built a wall. So we divided 75 feet in half. But that meant I still had a, you know, a bigger space than most lofts. And then I think the building was maybe 75 feet long too, and I just made a little living space for me in the back and it was almost all studio.

[00:44:45] So it was big. Over the years I, my pieces started to expand to get as big as they can get in the available space.

[00:44:52] Do the pieces come apart? Like how do you transport them and?

[00:44:57] Oh yeah!

[00:44:57] They come apart. I had an elevator, it was a freight elevator and I would always make sure make any piece would fit into that freight elevator. So then the piece would all come apart for being shipped, and then I'd go and put it back together again wherever it was being shown.

[00:45:16] Would you always have to be present personally when you're installing an exhibition?

[00:45:20] Yeah. And the lighting is really important. it was all in my mind how it came together. Yeah, I mean, it's as far as you can get from having an architect do a drawing and then having a building built based on the architect's drawing.

[00:45:37] I guess I still work like a painter. Like I would think, oh, I want some stairs over there. So I'd build the stairs and I think: maybe I don't want them that tall. or maybe I want them over here, or maybe I want that stairs and I want another stairs. you know, so I would see that way, kind of like you do when one does a painting try this, try that, move it around, change the color.

[00:46:01] But yeah, I, so it was all in my head how it went together. Sometimes I needed to do touchups and the lighting really, really important to me. But over the recent years, well, I had an opportunity to show three of the early pieces at a gallery called O'Flaherty's in New York. And actually, three pieces sold. Three of those early pieces sold out of that show. One went to the Metropolitan Museum. And it was clear that I had to, I had to have instructions. So before the pieces went to the show, they came to my studio up here now, which is a barn-like structure. And I really do have a lot of space, it's two floors. And my assistant Rory, we would put the pieces together, but we'd make photographs, we'd write down each step. So now there are instructions for, there's a couple of pieces that still need to have that done but that's been done for almost everything. Cause also, I'm not goin to be around forever, so...

[00:47:05] Do you also have instructions for the lighting and things like that, the environment around it?

[00:47:11] I try to describe so that... because it's always the ambient light, you know like, you adjust it looking. I try to describe it in very simple terms.

[00:47:22] Mm-hmm. What happens to the work in between installations? Where does it live?

[00:47:28] for many years it's lived at self storage units, four or five self storage units in ville, New York, behind what used to be called Stella Motors. So just these plain you know, these kinds of self storage with the roll down garage door, no heating, no nothing.

[00:47:46] And it's fine in there?

[00:47:48] I wasn't sure. Some of these pieces that I've showed in O’Flaherty’s I had not actually looked at closely in decades.

[00:47:57] Hmm.

[00:47:58] But then I thought maybe I'll just touch the wooden part and it will crumble because the termites have been at it, but they were okay. Somebody said maybe termites don't hang out around...

[00:48:10] But they, they were okay.

[00:48:12] Yeah, we've had myself and a friend of mine, we've had our storage units flooded in the last year or two. That's always fun to deal with.

[00:48:22] It's awful.

[00:48:24] Yeah. I, I can't think of anything worse than having to fix an old artwork that I'm like, finished, done. I don't wanna look at it anymore.

[00:48:34] Yeah. And um, yeah, just think about how it... I mean, I, it sounds like you were able to salvage the work.

[00:48:42] No, I mean, some of it is definitely damaged and it has like moisture damage and therefore needs to essentially be restored. And I haven't done that. I just, I'm looking at it, I'm like do I need that piece? I don't know.

[00:48:57] Or later.

[00:48:59] Yeah. And of course insurance doesn't help at all because you still have to do the work, you know?

[00:49:06] you know, I don't have any insurance. But I did have a piece go to a show in Texas one time and it came back in cardboard boxes that had obviously just been thrown around and gone down shoots in an airplane. And it was in really bad shape. It was insured by the exhibiting organization. So I did have professional restorers and it was really interesting to watch them work.

[00:49:35] Oh, that would be very interesting. Were you happy with result?

[00:49:40] yeah.

[00:49:41] Now that's, next level.

[00:49:43] Yeah. They, these Restore worked for the Met, they freelance for the Met. So they were the best. And they did, they did a great job. So I did not have,

[00:49:52] That's, I would like

[00:49:53] but if something happened in my storage units,

[00:49:56] Yeah.

[00:49:57] it would be me.

[00:49:58] Do you include details in your work, like inside or in the center that no one's gonna see, but you know, it's there?

[00:50:10] No. But I always did make like my two story house. I make little vistas for maybe talking about windows is easier. I love people looking into the piece all around. I like the idea of people who move like one point at a time around a piece, having a different view each time and things lining up or no longer lining up or some little vista of something that they couldn't see otherwise. So like little rewards for taking time and looking in.

[00:50:46] Mhm! I love that.

[00:50:47] My two story house, it had six windows in the bay. Well, It had more windows, but has a bay window.

[00:50:55] But anyway I had shades on the inside in some windows, so you could see light coming through from inside, but you couldn't see any details. But if you went around to another side and looked into another window, you'd see what was in that room that was unavailable from, from another view. So I guess part of it was getting people to walk around and make little discoveries.

[00:51:19] When people look at your work, what would you like the audience to take away from it?

[00:51:26] I guess maybe it's changed a little bit over time or, in the beginning, making really big things was also so exciting. I was installing at the Brooklyn Museum one time my deep station, I guess by, at the time it was my biggest piece and I was installing it, was, it was in the lobby.

[00:51:50] So people were coming and going and somebody came up and said: Who made this? And I said, I did. And he said: A woman made this!? So it was also, the size and the, just yeah, women can do this. Women are doing this. So there was that. But also just I don't know, a sense of mystery, a sense of awe, a sense of discovery, a sense in, in the beginning when my things looked... it was almost always something that looked a little decrepit. So it was also well, I, I love those things myself. But it was also kind of, um. look again, like my early subway things seemed like they're making this, they didn't actually say this, but I imagine people saying you're making sculpture about the subway.

[00:52:43] Actually one of my subway pieces, somebody said to me, I can smell the urine. And I thought that was such a great compliment.

[00:52:52] Very evocative.

[00:52:53] but it, it was partly, I found the subway so beautiful. And the darkness and the little islands of light when you're on express train and you're passing local stations that like little towns that you're passing. I just found it really beautiful and I wanted other people to see that it was beautiful. But in terms of, in a more political sense, I think I could say. Some sense of like, look again. You may dismiss what women do, but don't take it for granted that, that that's the right thing to do. Look again. And somebody once said to me I'm, I'm a big, really big jazz fan.

[00:53:31] And it's accompanied me in the studio for decades and decades. But someone said, yeah, this was a really early subway piece and I had a stairway going up in the front. But that was blocked off by a yellow Gate. And then I had stairway on the same diagonal going down in the back. And that I had little circles of I dunno, have you seen sidewalks with little circles of glass in them? I had something like that with light coming up through. So it was like the front way was blocked, but the back way uh, gave you entry. And, this, uh, it was an architect, he said: oh, that's so much like jazz in a way.

[00:54:13] Cool.

[00:54:14] like, you know, Women and um, blacks having this wonderful art. But refused the main entry but somehow managing to, to make something not giving up. Finding a way, nevertheless.

[00:54:31] Yeah. Coming back to the audience. What level of interaction, if any, do you invite from the audience? Can people touch the work? Can they step into it?

[00:54:43] No. And I should also say that I've always been proud and wanted to make work that could be appreciated by anybody at any level of sophistication. Kids, grownups, sophisticated art viewers, less sophisticated. And another great compliment I got once was I had a washing machine repair person at my place, a man, and I had a couple of maquettes sitting nearby and after a while he just said, I dunno why it is, but I just can't stop looking at those.

[00:55:19] And I thought, great, I love that. I'm not a fan of art theory. And I like something can appeal to everybody, whatever level of experience they bring to looking. So I had some other thoughts. Can you rephrase your question or just again?

[00:55:38] Oh,

[00:55:38] we were talking about the audience interaction. Like you said people definitely can't touch it. How do you design your work in a way to prevent people from touching or unwanted damage from the audience?

[00:55:53] I don't really design... well, I do design. Basically I mean, it's okay if somebody touches something as long as it doesn't leave a mark. And I show places where they have guards and stuff, mostly. So make my things so big, they're usually shown in museums where somebody is watching. But early on I did realize I didn't want any, when I started to make pieces with a track that somebody could walk in, I didn't want that. Because it throws all scale off where everybody else is looking.

[00:56:26] you know, my work also has a sense of being in a deserted place. So that, I try to just build things and let people know you're not supposed to walk in there, In the track area. But the main part of the work, I do always have a platform that it seems to be coming out of, which is about knee height.

[00:56:46] So visually the work starts at about knee height

[00:56:51] Right, So it doesn't sit on the floor per se.

[00:56:54] Right. It does sit on the floor, but it doesn't look like it sits on the floor. Like there's a platform and Yeah. I guess I've been quoted as saying this, I know I've said I don't want people to enter physically, I want them to bring their way in, imagine their way in.

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[00:57:45] Do you have any stories about work being damaged or vandalized?

[00:57:51] Yes. Um, yeah, my first. I guess it was my first temporary outdoor sculpture was in Dayton, Ohio. And I was invited to do a piece there. And the story actually has two parts to it almost. so I flew out there, they flew me out to look ahead of time so I could get an idea and they could show me some of the sites that were available.

[00:58:19] There's a program called Dayton City Beautiful. And I was born in Springfield, Ohio and Springfield, Ohio was on the Mad River and the Mad River goes through Dayton also. So I was kind of in home, my early life's territory. Anyway, I wanted to make a piece that acknowledged that a little bit.

[00:58:37] So, I said I'd, I'd like to see sites along the Mad River and the person running the program at the time took A long time to get me there. He basically took me to the site along Mad River when I was on the way to the airport to fly home. So it was late afternoon, it was dark and stormy. And he parked his car, which was a 1960 gold Cadillac, which was his, this is 1981 maybe.

[00:59:04] It was already an antique and he was very proud of it. And oh, and Dayton had floods, so levees had been built. So the river was down, you know sloped down to the river and all the parks and things were on top of the levy. So he parked his car there and then he got excited and he said, oh, make sure you walk down over here. And he went over with me. And by then it was pretty dark and we turned around and his car was pointing down into the river. And it seemed like slow motion the way those things do. And there was also my camera, my bag, my plane ticket, it was going down there.

[00:59:46] But we watched and the car entered the river and then the headlights stayed on and you could see the headlights shining up. It stopped in the middle of the river and the headlights were shining to the opposite bank. So I went home and I thought I don't know if I should do this, but I really wanted to do it. And so I imagined that the car believed there was a tunnel under the Mad River, so I would build the entrance and the exit on the opposite bank.

[01:00:16] So it was called the Mad River Tunnel. And so I made it. It was like, maybe I've been there in the spring and I was making it in the fall or maybe even the next year. But so there were volunteers to help me, everybody was really nice. And we worked on, the piece, but it started being vandalized as we worked on it.

[01:00:36] And that I think was because the press release, I went back to where I was staying, turned on the TV and it said, what is this an outhouse? The piece wasn't finished, but it was already being talked about on the TV news. And anyway, I finished it and photographs were taken and I went home and a couple weeks later I got a phone call: the piece had been pipe bombed. And I just thought I mean, I realize it only takes one person, You know, if only they had invited me so I could have seen it blow up and

[01:01:07] Yeah.

[01:01:08] my art dealer, Holly Solomon, said, oh, you know, I hope your work doesn't attract violence! Anyway. It makes quite a story.

[01:01:17]

[01:01:19] Yeah!

[01:01:19] So

[01:01:20] How long was it supposed to be up there?

[01:01:23] was, it was supposed to be, there had been other people you know, a, a number of artists over a period of three or four summers had made pieces and some of them were still there. And I thought I'd like mine to still be there too so I'll make it so it lasts. So I was using concrete blocks, cement blocks for the base.

[01:01:47] And I got the Tile Council of America to donate tiles.

[01:01:50] Wow.

[01:01:51] Yeah I, I thought, I mean, it was only a budget of a thousand dollars or something, but I thought, I'll try to make it permanent. Why not? But

[01:02:00] Did you build it all there on site?

[01:02:02] yeah. And that's where I learned another big lesson about scale. Because I was really making it look a lot like a piece that I'd already made. Because I only had two weeks and I, I worked much more slowly than that. And the piece indoors looked big enough. It looked, it had real presence, but outside it was so small. I thought it still worked but because it also, you could see neon lights on the opposite bank too. So in a sense it took up much more space. But um, that was interesting.

[01:02:37] Mm-hmm.

[01:02:37] Yeah. So how long does it take you to build something, start to finish?

[01:02:45] It varies. One, one piece, my Coney Night Maze, because I was teaching full time it just took a lot of time. I think I spend 13 years on it.

[01:02:56] 13 years!? Wow.

[01:02:59] it was big, it went through, I dunno, 9/11 happened in the middle of it, I lived downtown. I was not only teaching, I was doing permanent public art for Kennedy Airport. The offices were up in the Twin Towers. I was up in one of them day before. I

[01:03:15] Oh really?

[01:03:16] Delivered my model and was supposed to go back for a meeting and talk about my ideas the next day but the tower wasn't there.

[01:03:23] Oh my God.

[01:03:24] So

[01:03:25] That's wild.

[01:03:26] Anyway, I did a lot of living in those 13 years and a lot of work at other things and

[01:03:31] Yeah. So was that piece basically sitting in your studio like you were living with it while it's looming for over a decade? You must be very familiar with it and very sick of it.

[01:03:49] well, When I finally, and I, and I usually start pieces, I don't know where I'm gonna show them, I just do them. And I've been fortunate but you know, that one could take 13 years too, because there was no museum waiting to show it. But, when I did get a chance to show it at the Neuberger, I'd made that platform so long before, and the platforms were kind of odd shapes like how they went together. And it had been 13 years since I, or they'd grown incrementally. But that was kind of a horrible moment of, I thought maybe I'm not gonna be able to figure out. But it was great to show it, for sure. And then be able to have my studio free to begin to think about something else.

[01:04:33] Yeah, I imagine. Mm-hmm. Let's talk briefly about how you approach the commercial aspect of your work. Like selling or raising enough funds to make these huge projects. How do they get funded?

[01:04:53] They, you know, over the years I've sold, it was a real surprise to sell those three early pieces out of the O'Flagherty show. I mean, I've had them since the seventies. And they've been shown quite a few places, but never sold. So I never expect to sell. but over the years, I, maybe I had 10 of the smaller pieces and they all eventually found homes. And now what's left is like the really big stock.

[01:05:21] And I also went without, I mean, I've basically spent most of my time without gallery representation. I always make and show, but don't expect to sell. But one thing, I have always been good at getting grants. So I've had amazing number of grants over the years. I've never had a MacArthur, and I guess I never will now, but that's the really big one. But I've had some, several times. And then I've always worked at something else. Until now, I'm

[01:05:52] But have you made smaller works or maybe sketches that you sell as a more accessible thing to sell,

[01:06:02] No,

[01:06:02] I would never make anything just to sell. I don't know, I couldn't get my heart into it, you know. I have been asked by master printers to do prints and I've done that and I've enjoyed that.

[01:06:16] Like prints of photos of the installations.

[01:06:19] no, prints, based on a drawing, like a lithograph or something, working with a master printer who does the edition and advises me on how to work on the stone or whatever it is. And they're usually something that came out of my drawings or watercolors, trying to envision an installation.

[01:06:38] So they come out of the first stage where I do, first I do little painting or drawing, several of them. Then I do maquette, then I make the piece. And I used to think that maquettes would be something that people could sell, or Holly Solomon. I mean, I would show those too. I would show drawings and maquettes, alternate years.

[01:06:58] I'd show a big piece and then another year with her, I left her in 1985. But um, she sold a few little maquettes for not very much. And I'd say why can't you sell the maquettes and she'd say people love the big work, they know they can't have it, and then that cat just doesn't do the same thing for them that the big thing did, you know.

[01:07:20] Interesting. I would've thought that the smaller piece is at least a piece of your handy work that they can have, even if they can't afford the large work.

[01:07:33] or have room for it. I understand the size is a big obstacle. But yeah, I just have not done well dealing with the commercial side of this. I would do the work and hope things happen but... so far. Well, as I said, to sell those three pieces out of O'Flagherty's show was incredible. Fantastic.

[01:07:53] Can you tell me about a moment when you had to make a difficult decision about your work or career or where there was no perfect solution?

[01:08:06] I mentioned the Venice Biennale in 1982 and thinking no, you know, I need a year to work on this. The curator that came with Holly and saw something, I thought, I've just begun this. And then and I said, no, I can't do that. And I said, how about showing some other pieces that haven't been seen in Europe? Something that's just been in the Whitney Biennial. And Holly said no, we want this new piece. And so she came over and with a bottle of wine. And um, anyway, I said, okay, here's the deal: an artwork decides when it's done. I don't decide, I notice it, I recognize it, but an artwork takes as long as it needs to take.

[01:08:49] And that's when she said, quit your job. I'll send all the people down to work. and so I said, okay, you can do that. I'll quit my job, send the people, but if it's not ready to go, it's not gonna go. But then of course I wanted to go and I had all those people working. So it did work out. But there was another time when I was working on Deep Station and it was shown at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. And around the same time I was invited to make a new piece and show at the Brooklyn Museum. And they had money from the National Endowment or something like that. But somehow the money didn't, it got mishandled somehow.

[01:09:33] I don't know, but it wasn't there. It wasn't there. I was already working on a new piece that I was excited about. and then they said well, we don't have the money, can you just carry on by yourself in there? I said, no, I can't do that. And they said then we'll have to cancel the show.

[01:09:49] And I thought, no. And, and I thought, And I thought really hard one night and I thought Deep Station is up at University of Massachusetts Amherst. Nobody's seen it in New York. It would look great in the lobby. So I'm gonna propose we do that instead. And I didn't know if they agree, but they did agree.

[01:10:08] So that wasn't perfect, but it did work out. But there's one piece I've never, one thing I learned from the poet Ted Berrigan, who I think of as my mentor, he said, finish everything you start. And I won't go into all reason why that's such an important thing to do, but I do have that one piece and it was about New York fruit shops and um, never got finished?

[01:10:33] I'd say I was about a third of the way through making it, but that's the only time.

[01:10:37] Interesting. And you never felt compelled to just go and do it just at a later date. Just finish it yourself?

[01:10:45] No, I guess I just had moved on.

[01:10:47] Yeah. I hear you.

[01:10:49] And I it did some other pieces. Yeah,

[01:10:52] If you look back now, is there a moment that still feels significant, even if at the time it, it didn't look like or didn't feel like success?

[01:11:06] I dunno. I mean, I think about my early, looking back now, I can see that I was taking tiny steps towards installation when I was doing the seven by 10. Making that little plastic box that went out on the floor. And but after I made those, I got really lost again for a while. And did other things.

[01:11:27] But I see, later able to see that those were steps. It was all just kept on moving in the same direction. But I had side trips where I got very discouraged. And at one point after I'd made those, which I can see now were steps toward getting out on the floor and making installations, I went through a period of six months or something where I thought, I need to learn how to draw, I should paint, I should... and then somehow that came back, that moving toward what became installation.

[01:11:59] But I also think that in my journals, which, journal writing is totally important to the way I work. It's the way I think, the way I figure things out. And going through and typing up my journals I discovered I did that, that there would be an idea that, I thought I would get an idea and I'd write it in my journal and then time would go on and then I'd get it again. But I was thinking, the second time I thought, oh, that's the first, I've never thought of this before. It was just like, there's some things that just insist that they need to happen. I do see myself sort of as a vehicle, so there's just some things that they want me to make them and they don't go away, they keep coming back until I pay attention.

[01:12:48] You mentioned something interesting about how you don't like using the word practice about artists' work. Tell me about why is that?

[01:12:59] well,

[01:12:59] We never used it or needed it before. It was like, my art or, or what's going on in my studio or what I'm working on now, just my art. And and then I hated and as soon as I noticed it. And then it became so, so much everywhere. I mean, I think of my art as more like a mission.

[01:13:22] Practice doesn't describe it. And I'm serving something larger and all that kind of stuff. And a friend of mine, she was working on a book of somebody my age, somebody who's been a friend for a long time.

[01:13:36] And I had really big piece going on in my new studio up here in the country. And she brought her brothers over. And they're not art people except that they have a sister who's an artist. And so this great big thing, video component and, you know, they, I guess they were really impressed, but afterwards they said to her like, does she sell those things? And Cynthia said, no. And then they said why did somebody do that? Like they just couldn't understand. And Cynthia and I had arguments about use of practice because she was gonna have it in her book all over the place. And I said, I just don't like that word. And she didn't seem to understand what I was... but after she told me what her brother said, I said, there it is. If you hadn't used the word practice, you know, it's something else. Practice doesn't describe. Brothers might not have been so baffled, I dunno. Anyway. And so she went,

[01:14:30] very

[01:14:31] she went through the text of her book and took "practice" out and replaced it.

[01:14:37] Oh, okay. Did she replace it with the word mission?

[01:14:42] No, I don't know what she replaced it with.

[01:14:45] I like that idea. I think I might start using that.

[01:14:48] It's just artwork! What do you do? I'm an artist. What do you do? I make my art. Well, doesn't need "practice".

[01:14:53] Mm-hmm.

[01:14:55] That came in from somewhere else. And I know um, Peter Schjeldahl, Very big critic in this country. And he was a classmate of mine at Carleton. He died about four years ago. Somebody told me recently that he had hated that word too. And I would say he in some ways was the most preeminent art critic in this country, in his time. he wrote for the New Yorker. So that was interesting. I thought, okay, yeah.

[01:15:22] Great minds think alike.

[01:15:25] nobody ever needed that word before, it just came in somewhere. I don't think from art or artists originally, probably theorists.

[01:15:33] How would you say the art world has changed compared to when you were starting out?

[01:15:41] It's changed enormously. And I saw and was part of one of the biggest changes was, you know, women getting chances to show. But as I think what people say, okay, so women are getting a chance to show, they're showing more, people know more about their work. There are more women artists, but they're still not collected to the same degree that men are at all. Like the Guerilla Girls are group, some of whom I know. I could have been a girl, you know, the Guerilla girls?

[01:16:13] Yeah, of course.

[01:16:14] I could have been one.

[01:16:15] So you, you're mates with them. You could have been one of them?

[01:16:19] Yeah, I was at the meeting where it was being formed. But I was doing my political work, the whole law stuff, trying to stay in my law because I can't do both. But they became terrific. Um, It was always one, she always wore black and yellow striped socks. So, I always, if I'd see her in a gorilla mask, I always knew who it was. But yeah, terribly clever and smart and funny! And the idea that for the same amount of money you could buy just maybe one de Kooning sketch or 50 works by every really prominent woman artist you could think of at the time. So in New York, the art world was really small when I first got there. Compared to what it was and it wasn't international. And that was the very beginning and that was before I started to show. Um, so, so there was the women's thing that was a really big change I saw. And co-op galleries, like AIR beginning, artists taking things into their own hands. You know, I saw SoHo go from nothing to big art center and then become no longer, and now it's like Gucci stores and stuff like that.

[01:17:34] And then along the way, all this international, you know, things starting happening. So it went from, in New York anyway, from this, a small, almost intimate world and a world that was mixed with artists with um, with poets or maybe musicians. I guess that still goes on in many ways, but it seems vastly different.

[01:17:57] Yeah, it's pretty wild reading the stories of when people used to go to parties in New York and everybody knows everyone and everyone hangs out in the same place. It's like, wow. It's very, it's not the same anymore.

[01:18:12] yeah. But then, so there was that, but, and then women were also excluded from when it was like that.

[01:18:20] Yeah.

[01:18:20] so maybe women enlarged it all but that was a good thing.

[01:18:25] What advice would you have for an artist who is just starting out today with installation work?

[01:18:33] It's really hard to say because it just developed for me, I didn't even follow that. So to start out, I don't know how quite how somebody starts out now without big spaces. The big studio spaces just aren't available in New York anymore

[01:18:49] Nope. In Sydney either.

[01:18:51] No, and I, it seems to me that something happens that isn't good, which is if you don't have a big space to work in, you can't work through, I mean, Judy Pfaff has talked about working through The work, you know, what I described before. You try this, you try that, you look at it for a while, you come back to it, you develop it more, you get some new ideas. But it's something that evolves organically and over time. And if all you have is like a shoebox of a studio, all you can do is like a sketch and then you get to the big space but the best you can do is something that's half baked because you haven't had it or, or oversimplified or not rich. So I don't know what I would say that starting out she needs space. I think I mean there's outdoor installation too, I guess public art, but where you get to work through your ideas, I don't know.

[01:19:44] Yeah, it's very expensive nowadays.

[01:19:47] Yeah, I think space is really important. And I guess I'd also say, I mean this has been a one-way conversation, I haven't heard you talk about your work. But I would say to just decide you're gonna do installation art and think about why you wanna do that. You know, have you been inspired by things you've seen and it feels to you like the only way you can do what your heart wants to have you do. But if installation, art is like an idea, you know? It's like, oh, I think I'll do installation art, but I could do painting. I would say stay away from installation art because it's too difficult without space. One thing in space, although, when I taught, and this wasn't original with me, I had seen, I can't remember what gallery in New York, but there was... and there is somebody now named Lothar Osterburg who can do bigger installations, but he does a lot of things where you're looking through a lens into a space behind a wall, and they're miniature installations and they're wonderful.

[01:20:50] Okay.

[01:20:51] it's different. I mean, Very different, but there's one way that one could take I guess.

[01:20:58] Is there a dream project you haven't been able to make yet? If you could do anything wherever. No limitations.

[01:21:07] um,

[01:21:08] in 2018 I, I made a piece where I built, it was like a dock on Lake Superior looking at a distant ship. And then uh, the light changing. And I used video for the first time, like from a painting I'd done, but a video of a ship on the horizon and then light changing so that I needed time, I needed video.

[01:21:29] And it was more like a big diorama. And that's more the way I'm working now. And I have, I've made diorama boxes about the house I have here. It's a main character. But now there's another house, i've got almost eight dioramas now. They're what I did to get used to where I was and where I was living out of the city and I've done so much stuff with infrastructure and now I was looking at trees.

[01:21:55] And I did a video at night the first summer I was here and I turned around and my house came, like swimming into view. And this is another idea I thought was new when I thought of it then, but I actually tried to make a public artwork that didn't work out where I had a house floating around anyway, I wanna have a house floating through the trees, something like that.

[01:22:20] Well, You did have houses floating on water once

[01:22:24] So floating houses. I guess I wanna make

[01:22:27] more.

[01:22:28] Floating thorugh the trees. More, yeah.

[01:22:29] This would be more ghostly.

[01:22:31] And are you working on anything now?

[01:22:34] I'm just finishing up a couple of diorama boxes. And I'm um, I was gonna be doing a times square piece that I'm really excited about.

[01:22:43] Yeah. Tell us more about that

[01:22:45] It was scheduled fall of 2026, but now it's been scheduled fall of 2027. So I'd started work on that and I'm gonna, I think I'm gonna to make a mockup in my studio.

[01:22:56] I can't make it as tall as it would be, but I think I'll just push ahead with that and get the mockup done. It'll be fabricated by somebody else, but it's metal and I don't really work in metal. But anyway, that just changed so, so I'm thinking, I dunno, maybe I'll do the Times Square thing as far as I can get it as a mockup and ready to be fabricated. Take it down, put it in storage, and try this floating house thing.

[01:23:24] So that's gonna be larger than your usual, pretty large scale? The outdoor piece Yeah.

[01:23:33] No, it'll be my scale. And on the ground, the footprint won't be much, it'll be about the same as my recent, you know, last 20 years, 30 years bought really large pieces, like 27 by 20 or something like that, footprint. But they said for it to have any presence it really needed to go up to 18, 19, 20 feet.

[01:23:57] And I've always worked with scale, so that'll be different.

[01:24:01] Was that going to coincide with an exhibition in a gallery?

[01:24:05] Yeah. And I haven't talked to the gallery, so I'm not sure how that's all gonna develop.

[01:24:10] So where can people keep an eye on it? Find out more. See more of your work?

[01:24:18] Well there's an early piece up in Columbia Art Museum in Georgia, but well I do have a website that I think is pretty good and there's a way to communicate with me and I do send out newsletters from time to time. There's a way to get on my newsletter list through the website, donnadennisart.com you just Google me and it should take you there.

[01:24:42] Do you use social media as well?

[01:24:45] when the um, monograph was being worked on three or four years ago, the publicist with the publisher, which was Monacelli Press, said you gotta do Instagram. So I started to do, I've slacked off now. but Yeah, I do it, not very often.

[01:25:01] Mm-hmm. I look at it

[01:25:03] Well, I'll put the links to your website and your Instagram in the show notes so people can find you and follow you and yeah, there's a lot of information on the website. It's very thorough.

[01:25:19] I'll just add that the Instagram I, I would announce shows and things like that. If somebody follows regularly on Instagram but the best thing would be to sign up for my newsletter.

[01:25:31] Well, I appreciate your stories. It's, It's very interesting to get your unique perspective. I really enjoyed reading the journals. It's like a peek inside an artist's mind. I find that fascinating. I didn't manage to read all of

[01:25:49] I'll say my niece, who's a film editor, she, I found out she'd only read the first half and I said, that's when I was struggling. That's nothing was working out. You gotta read to the end. And I'm in the Venice Biennale.

[01:26:04] Okay.

[01:26:06] I'll say there, there are these two books too. There's writing toward Dawn, Journals, 1969 to 1982. Which is my excerpts from my journals but you know, crhonologically so you get the story of how things were happening for me. And that's available through Amazon. Published by Bamberger Books which is an interesting publisher. And Monacelli Press did a big, beautiful monograph, A Poet in three dimensions. they're both available on Amazon and. Probably the best way to get them.

[01:26:41] Yeah, I will put links to those as well, so people can just easily find it if they want to. I think they're, yeah, a great resource.

[01:26:51] and I'll say about the journal, speaking of a resource. The journal, as I was writing them, I was writing them for myself, to try to understand what I was doing um, but I did have, in the back of my mind, I thought maybe this will be helpful to some young woman, artist or people tell me any artist. When I edited I tried to leave it as much as I could in. I remember reading Anais Nin and being annoyed that she never talked inner journal, about how she got her money and money was

[01:27:22] Mm-hmm.

[01:27:23] so, I tried to make it be was real. It was about boyfriends, it was about money, it was about job. He was about my studio, my art, what I was reading, what I was listening to. Like everything, as much as I could.

[01:27:37] No, it's really engrossing. I found like you can't stop reading 'cause it's like what's gonna happen next? Almost. How is she gonna, how is she gonna feel about this piece next? Yeah, it inspired me to maybe I should go back to journaling.

[01:27:54] And about journaling, I would just say, I don't write every day. It's not a, it's not a diary. you know, I just, when I need to and there's something I'm about, or something amazing or troubling happened and I wanna record it. But it's mostly about figuring things out in my personal life, in my art, job wise. And I think one thing I really wanted to do was, as a young woman artist, I hated the way so many male artists seem to be mythified. I wanted to demythify what it was to be an artist.

[01:28:30] Yeah, that's, I think that's the best part of it. And it really does that well, like you get a glimpse into the behind the scenes thoughts and struggles and triumphs and like that you, one day you were like, I should have a jazz band at my opening. And then you did that. That's so cool.

[01:28:52] I'd love to do something really special for, I don't think she ever imagined gonna come up with the idea of a jazz band. Early jazz.

[01:29:01] Sounds great. Yeah. And there was dancing from photos.

[01:29:06] Yeah, with straw downs. Who also supplied the title for the monograph because he gave me a drawing once and he said: for the poet Donna, poet in three dimensions. I told the editors that's it, that's the title.

[01:29:20] Yeah. It's beautiful. Okay, Donna well, it's getting late where you are. I won't hold you anymore, but thank you so much for taking the time. It's been a real pleasure.

[01:29:30] Thank you for the invitation, and for the experience itself. Thanks.

[01:29:43] That was Donna Dennis, based in Germantown, New York. You can find out more about her work on her website, DonnaDennisart.com, which has a wealth of information and where you can subscribe to her newsletter. And you can also follow her on Instagram @DonnaDennisstudio.

[01:30:03] For fellow artists, I also highly recommend getting your hands on Writing Toward Dawn, a volume of selected journals that give insight into Donna's life, career, and process. There are many very relatable stories and some wild ones. The book is available to order on Amazon or via Bamberger books.

[01:30:25] Links to those as well as everyone mentioned in this episode are in the show notes and on our website, installation art podcast.com.

[01:30:35] If you've been enjoying this podcast and want to support it, I would be very grateful if you'd consider buying me a coffee at buymeacoffee.com/installationartpodcast. It helps keep this independent project going and allows me to continue bringing you these conversations with important guests.

[01:30:56] Link is in the show notes. Thank you for listening and for supporting, and until next time.