Patricia Cronin, Aphrodite and the Lure of Antiquity

Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, FL
Essay by Seth Pevnick, Ph.D. and Interview by Joanna Robotham
Tampa: Tampa Museum of Art, 2021

As the inaugural artist invited to respond to the Tampa Museum of Art’s Anquities Collection in the museum’s new bi-annual Conversations with the Collection series, Contemporary Artist Patricia Cronin was commissioned to create a new work. Focusing on a life size Aphrodite (1st c.e.) fragment, Cronin’s Aphrodite Reimagined envisioned her as a completed monumental cult statue with translucent missing parts hand sculpted and reconstructed. Sometimes appearing whole and other times with the changing light, appearing more fractured as a comment on our shifting certainties about truth and history. Additionally, Cronin created her first multi-layered acrylic process paintings and glass works, addressing themes of gender subverting historical approaches to statuary and reinvent ideas about the human, the heroic and the divine. A catalogue accompanies the exhibition with essays by Seth Pevnick, Ph.D., Chief Curator and Richard E. Perry Curator of Greek and Roman Art and an interview by Joanna Robotham, Curator of Contemporary Art.

24 color reproductions, 34pp.

Patricia Cronin : Shrine for Girls, Dublin

The LAB Gallery, Dublin, Ireland
Essay by Tina Kinsella, Ph.D.
Dublin: The LAB Gallery, 2017

Patricia Cronin’s critically acclaimed Shrine for Girls, a series of site-specific sculptural installations reflecting on the global plight of exploited women and girls, which debuted at the 56th Venice Biennale travels to Dublin. Curated by Sheena Barrett, Shrine for Girls, Dublin is poignantly installed in the historic Monto neighborhood, around the corner from the last operational Magdalene Laundry. This exhibition is accompanied by an 8 page foldout/poster with an essay by Tina Kinsella, Ph.D., Professor, Institute of Art, Design + Technology, Dublin.

2 color reproductions, 8pp.

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Patricia Cronin : Shrine for Girls, Venice

56th Venice Biennale, Chiesa de San Gallo, Venice, Italy
Essays by Phong Bui, Ludovico Pratesi and Maura Reilly, Ph.D.
Milano: Silvana Editoriale, 2015

Shrine for Girls, Venice is an Official Solo Collateral exhibition in the 56th Venice Biennale reflecting on the global plight of exploited women and girls curated by Ludivico Pratesi. Patricia Cronin: Shrine For Girls, Venice exhibition catalogue, includes essays by Phong Bui, Ludovico Pratesi and Maura Reilly. This exhibition is curated by Ludovico Pratesi and supported by The Fuhrman Family Foundation and The FLAG Art Foundation.

30 color reproductions, 64 pp.
ISBN: 9788836632190

Avilable at Silvana Editoriale
Available at Amazon

Le Macchine, gli Dei e i Fantasmi (Machines, Gods and Ghosts)

Centrale Montemartini Museo, Rome, Italy
Essays by Ludovico Pratesi and Peter Benson Miller, Ph.D.
Milano: Silvana Editoriale, 2013

Curated by Ludivico Pratesi, Machines, Gods and Ghosts is an exhibition by the American artist Patricia Cronin conceived especially for the Engine Room of Rome's Centrale Montemartini. The artist expands upon the already spectral dialogue between the classical sculptures on view and the industrial archaeology of the exhibition space. Inaugurated in 1912 as the city's first public electric station and converted into a museum in 1997, the Centrale houses an important part of the Capitoline Museums' archaeological collection. Entitled Ghosts, the works are ethereal representations poised between abstraction and figuration.

The works of Patricia Cronin are ghosts; they have an immaterial presence. Her images float in space, creating and proposing a new dialogue between time, memory, and desire. Their placement throughout the museum will generate a powerful dialogue between past and present, between archaeology, industry, and, of course, contemporary art. (Ludovico Pratesi)

In both Italian and English
30 color reproductions, 64 pp.
ISBN: 9788836627707

Available at Silvana Editoriale
Available at Amazon

The Zenobia Scandal:
A Meditation on Male Jealousy

Patricia Cronin
New York: Zing Books, 2013

In 1862, to show monumental marble sculptures in the International Exhibition at London’s Crystal Palace to critical acclaim was not uncommon, unless you were a woman. The Zenobia Scandal: A Meditation on Male Jealousy by Patricia Cronin focuses on the controversy surrounding an over life-sized marble statue titled Zenobia in Chains by American sculptor Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908). The story began when Hosmer submitted her sculptures for the prestigious International Exhibition. Her choice to portray the powerful Queen Zenobia the Ruler of Palmyra (modern day Syria), instead of Cleopatra, who was a popular subject of male artists, was an unusual and important one. But when she received more critical attention than her male counterparts, that’s when all the trouble began. In the words of Hosmer’s colleagues, acquaintances, friends, critics, including Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and the artist herself, Cronin tells a compelling story about gender based professional jealousy, male competition, friendship, betrayal, creative responses and ultimately perseverance and reward. A timeless theme, if it weren’t for the luscious 19th prose, you’d think you were reading a contemporary narrative.

19 black and white reproductions, 132 pp.
Published with Issue #23

Available at zingmagazine.com

Patricia Cronin : All Is Not Lost

Newcomb Art Gallery, Tulane University, New Orleans
Introduction by Charles Lovell
Essays by Helen Molesworth and Alexander Nemerov, Ph.D.
New Orleans: Tulane University, 2012

Featuring two major series of work from 2000 to 2009: Memorial to a Marriage and Harriet Hosmer: Lost and Found, the exhibition will unite Cronin’s work as it intersects ideas of memory, the recovery and writing of women’s history and contemporary discourses about gay and lesbian representation. A catalogue accompanies the exhibition with essays by Helen Molesworth, Chief Curator of the ICA Boston, and Alexander Nemerov, Professor of Art History at Stanford University. This exhibition is supported by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation.

100 color reproductions, 72 pp.
ISBN 13: 978-0-9668595-1-5

Available at Amazon

Harriet Hosmer:
Lost and Found, A Catalogue Raisonné

Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn NY
Patricia Cronin, preface by Maura Reilly, Ph.D. and an essay by William H. Gerdts, Ph.D.
Milano: Charta Art Books, 2009

Contemporary artist Patricia Cronin has created a catalogue raisonné of the works of American sculptor Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908). This catalogue combines hand painted images with art historical research to create a document that reveals the complexities of Hosmer’s career, reputation and legacy. Hosmer moved to Rome in 1852 and lived among a community of British and American artists and writers, and a circle of learned and well-to-do “independent women.” She had an important career, was praised by critics, won competitive commissions and earned enormous sums for her sculptures. In this unique volume, Patricia Cronin creates a conceptual framework to examine the histories of art and women at the intersection of the ivory tower and the marketplace in the form of a catalogue raisonné.

37 color reproductions, 104 pp.
ISBN 978-88-8158-732-2

Available at D.A.P. Art Books
Available at Amazon

Patricia Cronin:
The Domain of Perfect Affection, 1993-2003

UB Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY
Essays by Robert Rosenblum, Ph.D. and Sandra Firmin
Buffalo, New York: University at Buffalo, SUNY, 2004

This exhibition catalogue accompanies a 10-year survey of Cronin’s work curated by Sandra Firmin that traces her emergence on the New York art scene beginning in the mid-90s with her charged erotic watercolors through her investigations of class with Pony Tales (Wooster Gardens/Brent Sikkema, 1997), Tack Room (White Columns, 1998) and Luxury Real Estate Paintings (Yale University Art Gallery, 2002) to her triumphant ode to gay marriage, Memorial To A Marriage, (Deitch Projects, 2002). Cronin is conceptually rigorous and an overt sensualist, moving fluidly between 19th century art historical forms to merge them with contemporary content. A witty manipulator of Victorian tradition, she employs equestrian and mortuary sculpture as well as animalier and erotic painting to expose ways in which status and desire influence sexuality, gender, age, and class. This exhibition is accompanied by an essay by Robert Rosenblum, Ph.D, NYU Professor and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum curator and Sandra Firmin.

21 color reproductions, 44 pp.
ISBN 0-9748932-0-X

Available at Amazon

Patricia Cronin: Memorial To A Marriage

Grand Arts, Kansas City, MO
Essay by David Frankel
Kansas City: Grand Arts, 2002

Patricia Cronin’s Memorial To A Marriage, a 3-ton mortuary sculpture carved in Carrara marble is commissioned by Grand Arts’s Artists Award Program. Representing herself and her partner in a loving embrace, Cronin subverts 19th century Neo-classical sculpture by injecting contemporary sexual content, commemorating and making official in death her “marriage,” which cannot be made legal in life. This brochure includes an essay by David Frankel, Editorial Director, Museum of Modern Art. 

6 color reproductions, 4 pp.

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