More artists should keep diaries. While they can be deliciously revelatory, their pleasure mostly lies in the liberated quality of the writing. When writers keep diaries, the activity is freighted: this, after all, is their art form. Artists have a tendency to be less inhibited. Andy Warhol, for example, famously wrote down everything that happened to him; his diaries sometimes read like the society pages. Other artists record in painstaking detail the challenges—mental, emotional, physical—involved in the creative act. The diaries of sculptor Donna Dennis, set to be published later this month by Bamberger Books, fit this last category.
The diaries, Writing Toward Dawn: Selected Journals 1969-1982, come just as Dennis’s work is getting long overdue recognition. “Houses and Hotels,” a show of five major works, dating from 1967 to 1994, is currently on view at downtown New York’s O’Flahertys gallery; there are other presentations of Dennis’s work to follow elsewhere this year.
To read of the circumstances under which Dennis made the pieces featured in “Houses and Hotels” is gratifying. These large, complex architectural sculptures were pieced together in the limited space of her New York studio, sometimes lying on the floor under the artworks. But the challenge wasn’t only logistical. The works are also documentation of something far less timebound: the struggle to balance life—relationships, as well as practicalities like housing and money—with creative work. Like anyone fully engaging in creative activity, Dennis had to decide along the way where she would compromise in her life to make her art. As it should go without saying, it was harder during those years for a woman to do such a thing than it was for a man. Ironically, if it weren’t for one man in particular, she might never have kept her diaries in the first place.
Tourist Cabin Porch (Maine), Donna Dennis, 1976, Acrylic and enamel on wood and Masonite, glass, metal screen, fabric, incandescent light, sound, 6’6” x 6’10” x 2’2”.
Born and raised in the New York City suburb of Westchester, Dennis attended Carleton College in Minnesota in the early 1960s, then moved to Manhattan, amongst a social circle of fellow Carleton graduates like the late critic Peter Schjeldahl and the late painter Martha Diamond. Dennis, who was also a painter at that time, shared with the two of them an ambition that was apparent from the start. Another of their peers, the poet Anne Waldman, recalled in a New York Times obituary of Diamond earlier this year, “When you feel it with people who have this conviction already, it’s very much in them, and I felt that with Peter at an early age, and with Donna and with Martha.” Others in their social circle were poets, like Ron Padgett and Ted Berrigan, the latter of whom Dennis fell into a romantic relationship with. It was that relationship that gave birth to her journals. Arguably, the end of that relationship gave birth to her career.
“I was in kind of a major romantic thing with the poet Ted Berrigan, and Ted kept a journal,” Dennis told writer Nicole Miller in 2019. Dennis, too, started keeping a journal in the late ‘60s. Not surprisingly, it opens with a lot of talk of Berrigan: “While Ted is away I am drawing self-portraits”; “I am beginning to feel anxious about missing Ted.”; “I feel that maybe I’ve lost my mystery for Ted”; “I said to Ted, “It’s spring!”; “In the past week I’ve felt I really have come to understand what Ted was trying to tell me last year.”; “Ted says an artist never lets money come between him and his art.” She wonders who she is supposed to be at any given time: “One side of me wants to be so sensible & sane and respected that way—the other side of me wants to be weird and shocking—but not really that—more than that. One side of me wants to be a witch—a mystic, to be burned at the stake, to see the horrors of the universe, the vastness—to be a vehicle for that power—a vessel through which that power flows & makes itself manifest.” But then it’s back to Ted: “I am beginning to feel anxious about missing Ted.”
It’s only after the breakup with Berrigan that Dennis seems to come into herself. She reads The Feminine Mystique (“It’s changing my life at a time when I am open to change in a major way.”) She meets feminist critic Lucy Lippard. She joins a feminist consciousness-raising group, goes to marches. She has an affair with a woman artist (“Bisexuality appeals to me as an idea. Loving a woman seems a way to throw off the hurt and futility and bad habits of loving a man.”) She refreshes her wardrobe (“Bought dungarees today. Change in lifestyle.”) She enters the ‘70s with guns blazing (“finished The First Third by Neal Cassady. Sweet guy like Kerouac. Find myself envying them for their pleasure at their time (the ‘50s). Hope I’m getting as much from my time (the ‘60s) but no, I’m absolutely certain that this whole decade— the ‘70s—is mine—more than the ‘60s ever were.“) She finds her voice, her style: she starts making sculpture inspired by buildings she sees in the city, as well as in photographs by Walker Evans and George Tice, and in paintings by Edward Hopper.
