Donna Dennis has been creating “architectural sculpture” since her first commercial gallery show, at Holly Solomon in New York in 1975. Over the years she has exhibited with artists whose work has been categorized similarly, including Alice Aycock, Mary Miss, Jackie Ferrara and Siah Armajani. Coming of age during second-wave feminism, Dennis was uninterested in pure formalism and considered her own life to be a worthy subject for her art. She chose to make her constructions “personalized relics of urban life,” as curator Richard Marshall wrote in a catalogue essay for a 1981 Whitney Museum group exhibition.