Patricia Cronin (born in 1963 in Beverly, Massachusetts) is a New York-based feminist cross-disciplinary artist. Since the early-1990s, Cronin has garnered international attention for her photographs, paintings and sculptures that address contemporary human rights issues. Cronin's conceptual artistic practice transits across many aesthetic platforms addressing social justice issues of gender, sexuality and class, including: lesbian visibility, feminist art history, marriage equality and international rights of women and LGBTQ+ people. She subverts traditional art images and forms in a wide range of two and three-dimensional time-honored artists' materials and breathes new life into these images and forms by injecting her specific political content. Her critically acclaimed statue, "Memorial To A Marriage", is the first and only marriage equality monument in the world. A 3-ton Carrara marble mortuary sculpture of her life partner and herself was made before gay marriage was legal in the U.S., and has been exhibited widely across the country and abroad. Cronin began her career working for the Anne Frank Stichting (Foundation) in Amsterdam installing the traveling exhibition "Anne Frank in the World" in Europe and the U.S. Giving presence to female absence is a consistent thread that runs through and connects each body of work.
Life and work
Cronin received her BFA from the Rhode Island College in 1986 and received an MFA from Brooklyn College in 1988 where she studied with Lee Bontecou, Allan D'Arcangelo, Lois Dodd, Philip Pearlstein, and William T. Williams. Cronin also studied at the Yale University Summer School of Music and Art, Norfolk Fellowship Program in 1985 and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1991.
Cronin has had solo exhibitions at the American Academy in Rome, Musei Capitolini, Centrale Montemartini Museo, Rome, Italy, the Brooklyn Museum, Deitch Projects, and Brent Sikkema (now Sikkema Jenkins & Co.). Two survey exhibitions of her work have been organized; Patricia Cronin, The Domain of Perfect Affection, 1993 to 2003, UB Art Gallery, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY and Patricia Cronin, All Is Not Lost, 2000–2009,https://newcombartmuseum.tulane.edu/portfolio-item/patricia-cronin/ Newcomb Art Museum Tulane University, New Orleans, LA which was supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Cronin's work is in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art and Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, both in Washington, DC, Deutsche Bank, New York, NY, Perez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL, The Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, both in Glasgow, Scotland"Faculty Profile: Patricia Cronin," Brooklyn College. Tampa Museum of Art.
Cronin is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Rome Prize Fellowship in Visual Art from the American Academy in Rome, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant,"2007 Biennial Awards: Patricia Cronin," The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. two Pollock-Krasner Foundation grants, Anonymous Was A Woman Foundation Award and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation] Fellowship. Cronin has served as a Trustee on the Boards of the American Academy in Rome and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. A frequent juror of numerous arts organizations, she has also chaired and served on the College Art Association's Artist's Lifetime Achievement Award.
Cronin has lectured extensively at many U.S. and international museums, including: the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, United Kingdom; Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, Scotland, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Brooklyn Museum, Christie's, New York, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy. In 1994 she organized the panel "Lesbian Subjectivities" at The Drawing Center, New York, NY and guest edited the corresponding issue of Art Papers.
She has taught at many art schools and in the Graduate Art Programs at both Columbia University and Yale University. Since 2003 she has been a professor of art at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York, including Claire and Leonard Tow Professorships (2013-14) (2018-2020). In July 2023 The City University of New York Board of Trustees appointed Cronin to Distinguished Professor of Art.
Erotic Polaroids and watercolors (1992–1999) In these early works that blend performance and documentation, Cronin depicts the subject of explicit female sexuality in a way that both extends and critiques the role of sexuality throughout art's history.Jerry Saltz, "A Year in the Life: Tropic of Painting," Art in America, October 1994. Curator Sandra Firmin observed, "in contrast to her contemporary, photographer Catherine Opie, who received critical acclaim for her dignified studio portraiture of queer leather communities in California, Cronin's snapshots are taken in the frenzy of participation. Emerging concurrently in the early 1990s, both Cronin and Opie offer a lesbian counterpart to Robert Mapplethorpe's controversial X Portfolio from the late 1970s and early 1980s, which filtered multiracial sex acts and sadomasochism through a highly disciplined language of formal photography, merging homoerotic pornography and high art in the process." These works give voice to a particular experience (that of Cronin herself, whose vantage point as a participant is purposefully utilized throughout the work) while simultaneously speaking to larger questions regarding queer, lesbian or feminist subjectivities and the extent to which they are truly or accurately articulated and represented in artistic practice at large.Patricia Cronin, "What a Girl Wants," Art Journal, December 2001.
Boys and Girls from the Erotic Polaroid series were part of the exhibition Coming To Power: 25 Years of Sexually X-plicit Art by Women, which pays homage to the first generation of women artists who pioneered a new artistic genre in the mid-1960s and early 1970s using explicit sexual imagery and also presents the work of a younger generation of female artists that elicit sexual excitement as well as express autonomous pleasure, passion and pain. The exhibition was conceived by Cronin and fellow artist, Ellen Cantor, during their time at Skowhegan School of Art in the summer of 1991 and their curatorial collaboration including studio visits, venue meetings and fundraising efforts on the project continued through 1993. Due to a disagreement with Cantor over a #metoo incident Cronin had with a museum director, she walked away from the project and their exhibition was presented a few months later at the David Zwirner Gallery listing Cantor as the sole curator.
Pony Tales and Tack Room (1996–1998) Cronin uses the "equestrian lifestyle" as a lens through which to see sexuality and class. In Pony Tales, Cronin interrogated the boundaries and possibilities of portraiture by focusing on a non-human subject, horses. Drawing inspiration from her own fascination with the species, as well as the popular literature and cult surrounding them, Cronin painted individual equestrian portraits that speak to how cultural fascination and fetishization create social values. Framed in walnut and installed on Schumacher's "Summer Country Archive" wallpaper, this body of work debuted at Sikkema Gallery, and was also shown at Real Art Ways, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and UB Art Gallery at SUNY Buffalo.
Along with these portraits, an upper class equestrian socio-economic meilleure blending real estate and subversive female empowerment also inspired Tack Room (1997–98), an architectural environment where Cronin built a life-size stable complete with all the equestrian accouterments including: saddles, bridles, equestrian clothing, blankets, training books, first aid and art. After closer viewing, the smell of leather and hay permeates the installation and suede chaps, leather bridles and metal bits, whips and paddles accumulated suggest a more sexual reading and open up Cronin's fantasy of what an architectural space where female sexuality isn't ridiculed, but rather celebrated could look like. The work was exhibited at White Columns (1998) and was one of the top ten shows of 1998 by art critic Lisa Liebmann in Artforum.Lisa Liebman, "Artforum Top 10," Artforum, December 1998. It was also presented at The Armory Show (2017) in the curated section of large installations, Platform, curated by Eric Shiner and was shown again in "Horses?" exhibition at Chart gallery in Tribeca (July 9 - September, 2021).
Luxury real estate paintings (2000–2001) Continuing her interest in how cultural meaning is enshrined and propagated, Cronin turned her attention to the real estate market. This series depicts lavish, expansive and expensive homes and estates titled with the price and location of each estate (i.e., "$10,000,000 (Southampton)"). These small-scaled works, no larger than nine by fifteen inches, recall intimate real estate listings that ironically belie the actual expansion of the houses they advertise. Cronin used listings in Sotheby's International Realty as her source material, a conscious choice that raises questions about class and its relationship to fine art markets, controlled and regulated by auction houses like Sotheby's.Leigh Anne Miller, "The Lookout: A Weekly Guide to Shows You Won't Want to Miss," Art in America, July 2001. The works were shown at Cronin's solo survey exhibition The Domain of Perfect Affection: 1993–2003 at the University at Buffalo Art Gallery in 2004 and in Looking At America exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, in 2002.
Memorial To A Marriage (2002) To address the lack of women represented in public monuments and same sex marriage being illegal Cronin created Memorial To A Marriage, the first Marriage Equality monument in the world. In 2001, the Kansas City-based arts organization Grand Arts awarded Cronin an Artist's Project Grant to create Memorial To A Marriage, a three-ton Carrara marble mortuary statue of Cronin and her partner, the artist, Deborah Kass. The two women, a lesbian couple, depicted recumbent in an entwined embrace on a bed. As Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston former chief curator Helen Molesworth writes, the work "traffics in love and death, and in the intimate relations between these two structuring poles of human existence."Helen Molesworth, "Ghosts and Sculpture: Harriet Hosmer and Patricia Cronin" in All is Not Lost, p. 11. Utilizing a patriotic form, American Neo-classical sculpture, to address a federal failure (the prohibition of gay marriage), Memorial to a Marriage balances visual poetry with political protest. Although now legal, marriage equality remains an extremely contentious political and social issue in the United States.
Completed in 2002 when gay marriage was illegal in the U.S., the only legal protections available to gay and lesbian couples were about death: wills and health care proxies. Cronin created the marble mortuary statue of the two lovers, a decade before the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act in 2012. The art historian Robert Rosenblum described the work as "so imaginative a leap into an artist's personal life and so revolutionary a monument in terms of social history that it demands a full scale monograph."Robert Rosenblum, "On Patricia Cronin: From Here to Eternity" in Patricia Cronin: The Domain of Perfect Affection, 1993-2003. (Buffalo, NY: University at Buffalo Art Gallery, 2004), 10. He named the installation as one of the ten best shows of 2003 in Art Forum.Robert Rosenblum, "Best of 2003: Patricia Cronin, Memorial to a Marriage," Artforum, December 2003.