Dennis is one of a small group of groundbreaking women—including Alice Aycock, Jackie Ferrara and Mary Miss—who pushed sculpture toward the domain of architecture in the early 1970s. Drawing from overlooked fragments of rural and urban vernacular American architecture, her sculptures—tourist cabins, hotels, subway stations, roller coasters—have represented stopping places on the journey through life.
Dennis has received solo exhibitions 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/puppeteer Dan Hurlin.
Dennis’ 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.
