User:Rcmar/Cronin, Patricia

Patricia Cronin (born 1963) is an American conceptual artist living in New York City. Cronin’s paintings, sculptures, installations and public art address contemporary political issues of feminism and homosexuality.

Education & Early Life
Cronin studied at Yale Norfolk, the Yale University Summer School of Music and Art Fellowship in 1985 and received a BFA in painting and drawing from Rhode Island College in 1986. She then moved to New York City and received her MFA in painting and printmaking from Brooklyn College in 1988 where she studied with Lee Bontecou and Phillip Pearlstein. After graduating, Cronin worked as an architectural photographer in New York City for Moliterno Stone Company. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1991.

From1992 to 1993 she worked as the exhibition supervisor for the Anne Frank Center in New York City, the sister institution of the Anne Frank Stitchting in Amsterdam overseeing the traveling exhibition “Anne Frank in the World” in the United States and Europe. This was Cronin’s first introduction to Europe (The Netherlands, Germany and Poland) and also when she first began using watercolors.

Early Career
Cronin first became known for a series of performance based Polaroid photographs and watercolors in the mid-90s of her and her partner making love, painted from the intimate perspective of a participant. Subsequent works have continued to address sexuality, alongside class, historical representation, and gender but to take forms as divergent as horses rendered in bronze and commemorated in portrait paintings installed on wallpaper, a life-sized tack room, and paintings of luxury homes titled by the price and location of the real estate.

Solo exhibitions included Pony Tales at Brent Sikkema (formerly known as Wooster Gardens) in 1997 and Tack Room at White Columns in 1998. Her Luxury Real Estate Paintings were presented in “Looking At America” exhibition at Yale University Art Gallery in 1999.

Notable Exhibitions
In 2002 Grand Arts, the Kansas City based arts organization, awarded Cronin with an Artist’s Project Grant to create “Memorial To A Marriage,” a 3-ton Cararra marble mortuary statue of Cronin and her partner, the artist, Deborah Kass embracing in bed. Deitch Projects (her New York gallery) represented the project and facilitated it’s installation on the couple's burial plot at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. Cronin has said “I used a nationalist form, American Neo-Classical form, to address what I consider a federal failure; prohibiting gay people from marrying.”

The late pre-eminent art historian, New York University Professor and Guggenheim Museum curator Robert Rosenblum selected the piece as one of the Top 10 shows for 2003 in Artforum magazine wrote: “Henry James might wince, were he to see this pathbreaking update to what he called “the white marmorean flock.” After total immersion in nineteenth-century tomb sculpture, with an ear to the gossip about a colony of American lesbian sculptors who chiseled neoclassic nudes in Rome, Cronin resurrected these fantasies in a fresh offering to the supernatural: a monument to herself and her lover, the painter Deborah Kass, entwined like Victorian babes-in-the-wood. The supine half-naked bodies and classical draperies transcend mortal fact to become a lesbian Liebestod. Even more amazing is that this project found a home not in Woodstock but in Woodlawn, side by side with the tombs of all those straight, wealthy, tight-laced WASPS.”

In 2004, a ten year survey exhibition, “The Domain of Perfect Affection, Patricia Cronin, 1993-2003,” was organized by the UB Art Gallery at the University at Buffalo. The catalogue included essays by both Robert Rosenblum and the UB Art Gallery curator, Sandra Firmin.

In 2009, the the Brooklyn Museum mounted Cronin’s first solo museum exhibition “Harriet Hosmer, Lost and Found,” Cronin’s watercolors illustrating the work of Harriet Hosmer: the successful nineteenth-century American sculptor whose historical importance has been largely unrecognized. Cronin, continuing her project of historical intervention, compiled Harriet Hosmer: Lost and Found, A Catalogue Raisonné, the definitive monograph on Hosmer in which the neoclassical artist is represented by watercolors of her work painted by Cronin.

The Pulitzer Prize winning art critic Holland Cotter wrote in The New York Times, Cronin first became aware of the American 19th-century sculptor Harriet Hosmer when she came across images of Hosmer’s marble figures while doing research for a sculpture of her own, “Memorial to a Marriage”… Cronin’s reaction … was to wonder why Hosmer wasn’t better known, and she decided to do something to ensure that she would be. The result was the project just installed in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum: a show of Ms. Cronin’s black-and-white watercolors accompanied by a book, which together constitute a document of, and homage to, Hosmer’s work. The complete set of paintings, arranged in chronological sequence, is reproduced in the book, along with scholarly data about each sculpture and commentary by Ms. Cronin. This exhibition catalog doubles as a catalogue raisonné of Hosmer’s art as seen through the eyes and hand of another woman and artist.

Cronin’s work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally, Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including: Yale University Art Gallery, Neuberger Museum, Tang Teaching Museum, the Aldrich Museum, Georgia Museum of Art, McNay Art Museum, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Long Beach Museum of Art, Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma (MACRO), the American Academy in Rome, the Cobra Museum in Amsterdam and Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow, Scotland.

Her work has been included in exhibitions in New York galleries including: Paul Kasmin, David Zwirner, Brent Sikkema, Deitch Projects, Sonnebend, Marlborough, the Drawing Center and Alessandra Bonomo in Rome and Carole Biagiotti in Florence, Italy.

Awards and Grants
Cronin is the recipient of many awards and grants that include a 2001 Grand Arts Artist Grant, Art Matters Grant, and two Pollack-Krasner Foundation grants. Cronin’s undergraduate school, Rhode Island College, honored her in 2004 with a Distinguished Alumni Award.

In 2006 Cronin won the coveted Rome Prize in Visual Art at the American Academy in Rome and lived in Rome for a year and travelled extensively throughout Italy and Greece.

Since then she has won a New York Foundation for the Arts artist grant (2007), a Deutsche Bank Fellowship (2007), the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant (2007), a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship (2009) in Umbertide, Italy, and an Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2009).

Collections Deutsche Bank, New York, NY

Teaching
She has held numerous teaching positions at different art schools and liberal arts colleges including; Yale University, Columbia University, School of Visual Arts, Maryland Institute College of Art, Pratt Institute and Cooper Union. Since 2003 she has been an Associate Professor of Art at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York.