Patricia Cronin

Patricia Cronin
Born 1963
Beverly, Massachusetts
Nationality American
Education Rhode Island College
Brooklyn College
Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture
Yale University Summer School of Art and Music, Norfolk
Known for Painting, Sculpture
Awards Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome
Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship
Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant
Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation Award
New York Foundation for the Arts, Artist Fellowship
Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant

Patricia Cronin (born in 1963 in Beverly, Massachusetts) is an American visual artist living in New York City. Cronin gained notoriety in the mid-1990s for a series of performance based Polaroid photographs and watercolors of her and her partner making love, painted from the intimate perspective of a participant. This early work established many recurrent themes in Cronin’s practice: homosexuality as a theoretical concept and a lived experience, the legacy of the relationship between feminism and contemporary art, the intersection of conceptual and traditional methods of art making and the body as an expressive and expressing entity, focusing on social justice.

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 and Philip Pearlstein. 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 Brooklyn Museum, the American Academy in Rome, Deitch Projects, Brent Sikkema (now Sikkema Jenkins & Co.) and Conner Contemporary Art in Washington, DC. Cronin’s work is in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art, Corcoran Collection, Washington, DC, Deutsche Bank, New York, NY, The Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) and Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, both in Glasgow, Scotland.[1]

Cronin is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant,[2] two Pollock-Krasner Foundation grants, Anonymous Was A Woman Foundation Award and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship. In 2006 Cronin was awarded the John Armstrong Chaloner/Jacob H. Lazarus Metropolitan Museum of Art Rome Prize Fellowship in Visual Art from the American Academy in Rome, and is now the President of the Council of the Society of Fellows and serves on the Board of Trustees.

Cronin has lectured extensively at many U.S. and international museums, including: the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Brooklyn Museum, Christie's, New York, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She has taught in the Graduate Art Programs at both Columbia University and Yale University and since 2003 she has been a Professor of Art at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York.

Erotic Polaroids and Watercolors (1992-1999)

In these early works, Cronin depicts the subject of homosexual copulation in a way that both extends and critiques the role of sexuality throughout art’s history.[3] Working with a subject that has historical roots as diverse as the nineteenth century paintings of Gustave Courbet and Robert Mapplethorpe’s Polaroids from the 1980s, Cronin’s versions employ a degree of personal implication, evocative use of materials and selective decontextualizing cropping to create visually abstract and expressive portraits that differ from their other well known predecessors. 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.[4]

Pony Tales and Tack Room (1996-1998)

Cronin’s next series also interrogated the boundaries and possibilities of portraiture by focusing on a non-human subject, namely horses. Drawing inspiration from her own fascination with the species, as well as the popular literature and cult surrounding them, Cronin painted works that speak to how cultural fascination and fetishization create social values. Along with these portraits, horses also inspired Tack Room (1997-1998), an installation where Cronin recreated a life size stable complete with saddles, clothing and blankets. The work was exhibited at White Columns in 1998 and art critic Lisa Liebmann wrote in Artforum that the installation was one of her top ten shows of 1998.[5]

Luxury Real Estate Paintings (2000-2001)

These works depict lavish, expansive and expensive homes and estates but in a way that continues Cronin’s interest in how cultural meaning is enshrined and propagated. Titled with the price and location of each estate, these works are tiny in scale, no larger than nine by fifteen inches, and 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.[6] 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 as part of the Looking At America exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, in 2002.[4]

Memorial to a Marriage (2002)

Memorial to a Marriage by Patricia Cronin (detail)

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 embracing in bed.

The work predated the passage of same-sex marriage in New York State by almost 9 years and it was its historical position that allows the work to take on the traditional function of a memorial while simultaneously interrogating and deconstructing the very principles of that designation. The socio-political context of the debate surrounding same-sex marriage charges the work with questions about the function of a memorial and what the process of memorialization means as a culturally defined and sanctioned phenomenon. The title of the work itself, coupled with its functional purpose as a grave marker, raises questions about the relationship between marriage and death, marriage and memorial, the eternal and how each of these concepts are or can be inflected by the context of homosexuality in America at the turn on the 21st century. 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.”[7] Deeply personal, Memorial To A Marriage lifts the thin veil of anonymity present in Cronin’s earlier erotic works. As a memorial, then, it also memorializes the individual and personal manifestations of the more universal concept of marriage.

Cronin was particularly inspired by nineteenth-century neoclassical sculpture and the work is an important example of her interest in working with traditional materials and sources. Coupling of the classical methods with the very much non-classical content of the work, Cronin again shows how an attunement to historical means of art making can continually yield new and contemporary results.

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.”[8] He later named the installation as one of the best shows of 2003.[9]

Deitch Projects installed the marble sculpture in 2002 on the Cronin-Kass plot at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx where it was on view until 2010, when it went on exhibition tour. A bronze version has taken its place and other bronze versions have been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, Palmer Museum of Art, Neuberger Museum of Art, Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, and the FLAG Art Foundation.

In 2012 Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, in Glasgow, Scotland permanently installed Cronin's 2003 Memorial To A Marriage bronze statue on loan from the collection of the The Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow. The work was purchased by GoMA in 2011 with taxpayer dollars in the U.K., a feat that would have been unthinkable in the United States where gay marriage remains an extremely contentious political and social issue.

Harriet Hosmer: Lost and Found (2009)

During Cronin’s research for Memorial To A Marriage, her interest in nineteenth-century sculpture introduced her to the work of Harriet Hosmer, an American expatriate who moved to Rome in 1852 and subsequently became known as the first professional woman sculptor.[10] While at the American Academy in Rome, Cronin embarked on a large-scale research project to resurrect and reassess Hosmer’s work. The result was the production of a catalogue raisonné for which Cronin took on the roles of historian, artist and curator as she herself compiled all existing information on Hosmer, illustrated the book with her own watercolors and wrote descriptions of each work.

As Maura Reilly, founding curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, writes, Cronin’s complex role as an artist raises questions such as “How should she (Cronin) re-produce Hosmer’s sculptural work in the catalogue, most of which is not locatable, no longer extant, only known via descriptions or via old photographs? How to reclaim and insert into the canon the life’s work of a nearly forgotten artist?”[11]

The process of creating such an exhaustive reappraisal of a forgotten women artist recalls feminist art strategies of the early 1970s, most notably those spearheaded by the feminist art historian Linda Nochlin. However, Cronin shows herself to be actively questioning that type of work and presents her catalogue raisonné as a potentially critical feminist project. This is particularly evident in Cronin’s handling of the works for which visual images does not exist. In these cases Cronin’s depicts, not a physical likeness, but its suggestion, what art historian Alexander Nemerov describes as ghosts[12] and Cronin herself calls “phantoms." In these moments of absence the viewer is made aware of the built in impossibility of the project which, with these watercolors, become part of its subject and thus speaks directly to the legacy of feminist art and its implication in contemporary artistic practice.

The work was exhibited at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art in 2009-10. Reviewing the show in The New York Times, Pulitzer Prize winning art critic Holland Cotter wrote, “In short, Ms. Cronin’s Hosmer show — organized by Lauren Ross, interim curator of the Sackler Center — is a complex package: a total work of art that is also a historical document of the careers of two artists, past and present, and a salvage operation to secure the visibility of both artists over time.”[13]

Dante: The Way of All Flesh (2012)

Cronin’s ongoing relationship to Italian art history and literature has continued past her Rome Prize year at the American Academy in Rome in 2006-2007. Looking at the global financial crisis, Cronin felt a need for a new humanism, which she has integrated into her artistic practice. Cronin turned to Dante Alighieri’s Inferno as a point of departure for a series of expressive figure oil paintings, watercolors and bleach drawings. The series shows her expanding on recurring themes – whose life has value and who decides, church or state – while simultaneously drawing on the classic work to elaborate on Dante’s allegorical timeless story of a cautionary tale largely gone unheeded.[14]

Le Macchine, Gli Dei e I Fantasmi (2013)

For her 2013 exhibition at the Centrale Montemartini in Rome, Cronin used a new context to re-stage and re-conceptualize the many of the concerns of her earlier work. Conceived specifically for the museum’s Engine Room—built in 1912 as the first public electricity plant in Rome and now filled with Classical sculptures culled from the archeological collection of the Capitoline Museum—“Machines, Gods and Ghosts” resurrects the “phantoms” or “ghosts” from Cronin’s Hosmer project. Still executed in watercolor, but enlarged on six silk panels hung throughout the space, these new pieces further highlight the already effective juxtaposition of classical sculptures and their modern surroundings and in their contrasting materiality and formalism, underscore questions of absence and omission as they relate to the history of art. If Cronin’s work on Harriet Hosmer asked the important question of who and what gets remembered in Art History, then this newest project stresses how contemporary art might also be utilized to ask this same question. The show was accompanied by a catalogue, published by Silvana Editoriale, with essays in both Italian and English written by Peter Benson Miller and Ludovico Pratesi.

Shrine for Girls, Venice (2015)

Shrine for Girls, Venice is a Collateral Event of the 56th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia. Inside the sixteenth-century Church of San Gallo, this dramatic site-specific installation focuses on the global plight of women and girls, often facing violence, repression and forced ignorance, and is a shrine in their honor. Shrines, part of every major religion's practice, provide a space for contemplation, petition and rituals of remembrance. Here, Cronin gathered hundreds of girls' humble clothes from around the world to reference specific tragic events in India and Nigeria, as well as, the United Kingdom and the United States, and arranged them on three stone altars to act as relics of these young martyrs. Juxtaposing brightly colored saris like those worn by gang raped and murdered girls in India, muted palettes of hijabs worn by the students kidnapped by Boko Haram in Nigeria and ghost-like values of aprons from the Magdalene Laundries in the UK and US with the richness of the marble and wood paneled church interior opens up a space for refuge and reflection in the face of human tragedy. Shrine for Girls, Venice proposes a new dialogue between gender, memory and justice.

Notable Exhibitions

Books and Films about Cronin

References

  1. ↑ "Faculty Profile: Patricia Cronin," Brooklyn College.
  2. ↑ "2007 Biennial Awards: Patricia Cronin," The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation.
  3. ↑ Jerry Saltz, "A Year in the Life: Tropic of Painting," Art in America, October 1994.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Patricia Cronin, "What a Girl Wants," Art Journal, December 2001.
  5. ↑ Lisa Liebman, "Artforum Top 10," Artforum, December 1998.
  6. ↑ Leigh Anne Miller, "The Lookout: A Weekly Guide to Shows You Won't Want to Miss," Art in America, July 2001.
  7. ↑ Helen Molesworth, “Ghosts and Sculpture: Harriet Hosmer and Patricia Cronin” in All is Not Lost, p. 11.
  8. ↑ 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.
  9. ↑ Robert Rosenblum, "Best of 2003: Patricia Cronin, Memorial to a Marriage," Artforum, December 2003.
  10. ↑ Patricia Cronin, “Lost and Found,” in Harriet Hosmer Lost and Found: A Catalogue Raisonné, p. 13.
  11. ↑ Maura Reilly, “Preface,” in Harriet Hosmer Lost and Found: A Catalogue Raisonné, p. 10.
  12. ↑ Alexander Nemerov “Ghosts and Sculpture: Harriet Hosmer and Patricia Cronin” in All is Not Lost, p. 27.
  13. ↑ Holland Cotter, "Art in Review," The New York Times, June 18, 2009.
  14. ↑ Patricia Cronin, "Dante’s Inferno: The Way of All Flesh," M/E/A/N/I/N/G, November 2011.

External links