A Trailblazing 1980s Subway Installation Takes Over a Hamptons Barn

Only two weeks remain to catch a rare glimpse of one of the strangest, and most satisfying, art installations of the past 50 years. Regrettably, it is not easy to visit Donna Dennis’s (1981–85) right now: Until August 15, it’s in an old barn on the Ranch, a space run by dealer Max Levai on the far end of Long Island, in Montauk, New York. But if you get there, you will be glad you made the effort.

With art this potent, it seems improper to spoil a first impression, so let’s be brief. Walking from the open farmland into the structure, you find a scaled-down subway station that Dennis constructed from wood, Masonite, paint, glass, metal, and plastic. It has grand arched ceilings and glowing lights. Two tracks merge into one, and then stop—you’re at the end of the line. No one is around. A clock hangs on the wall of a control room of some sort, with an office above it that is too high up to peer inside. Every few minutes, the sound of a train plays through unseen speakers.

Over the decades, Dennis, an artist’s artist who is 82 this year, has built a number of such eerie architectural installations, which are too large to be called miniatures but too compact to be entered safely. (Typically, she pegs the height of doors to her eye level and works from there.) is 11 feet tall, 20 feet wide, and 24 feet deep, but it feels far larger, perhaps because of its astonishing detail (every rivet and brick rendered, paint splattered across the floor to suggest grime), perhaps because of its shadow-filled interiors.

As in George Tooker’s 1950 painting , meticulous verisimilitude and compressed space birth a faint but palpable unease. Nancy and Ed Kienholz’s gritty, dilapidated constructions may come to mind, but Dennis does not share their zest for shock. There is a sense of possibility in the air down here, a private charge. Something is happening. (The artist has spoken of her underground environment as “a metaphorical kind of space having to do with a number of aspects of human experience and, of course, the subconscious.”)

The subway you keep hearing will never pull into the station, and all the stairs to the surface appear to be blocked by gates. is a place of confinement, of refuge, and of thinking. It is in limbo. It is also a virtuoso display of art-making—an exemplar of the important fact that glorious, ambitious works can still be achieved with rudimentary materials and hard work, no industrial fabrication necessary.

Following its completion in 1985, the installation was displayed at a number of museums around the United States through 1998. Since then, however, it has been sitting in storage. An institution should acquire it and put it on permanent view, so that we don’t have to wait another quarter-century to see it. (Those that do not have the space should consider the modestly sized, and almost as engrossing, works by Dennis that O’Flaherty’s gallery just showed in Manhattan.)

Like, say, Judy Chicago’s (1974–79) at the Brooklyn Museum or Cady Noland’s 1989 Budweiser-can fort at the Rubell Museum in Miami, is a defining artwork for both an artist and an era. It is a star, and it deserves a far larger audience. Patiently, it awaits you.