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.
[5] 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.
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.
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.
[13] 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.
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.
[16] With the help of Deitch Projects, Cronin purchased and installed the marble sculpture in 2002 on the couple's actual personal burial plot at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, NY, a National Historic Landmark.
It is the resting place for many historic figures including artists, writers, civic leaders, entrepreneurs, great entertainers and jazz musicians everyone from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Madame C. J. Walker, J.P. Morgan, Joseph Pulitzer, to Herman Melville and numerous mausoleums designed by architects McKim, Mead & White and John Russell Pope with Louis Comfort Tiffany and John LaFarge stained glass windows.
In 2022, Memorial To A Marriage, became the centerpiece in the world's first VR LGBTQ+ Museum debuting at the Tribeca Film Festival and winning the prestigious New Voices Award in the Immersive Competition.
[18] Cronin won the Rome Prize for her series on Harriet Hosmer, an American expatriate who moved to Rome in 1852 and subsequently became known as the first professional woman sculptor[19] The result of her research that year was the production of a catalogue raisonné for which Cronin took on the roles of historian, artist and curator as she herself compiled art historical research 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 "in choosing a female artist, one who was famous in her day yet relatively unknown today, Cronin's deconstructivist project diverges from her previous interventionist project, Memorial To A Marriage.
"[20] The catalogue combines hand painted images with art historical research to create a document that reveals the complexities of Hosmer's career, reputation, and legacy.
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.
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.
Cronin turned to Dante Alighieri's Inferno as a point of departure for a series of expressive figurative oil paintings, watercolors and bleach portraits of corrupt politicians and religious leaders.
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.
Using a 21st-century printing technique, dye sublimation enlarged on silk, these panels hung throughout the space slowly undulating, these new pieces further highlight the evocative juxtaposition of anachronic pairings 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, art and civilization including the anonymous artists that carved the Classical marble sculptures and the anonymous missed workers who are no longer employed at the power plant.
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.
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.
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.
Julie Belcove writes in the Financial Times, "The pared-down presentation demands quiet reflection, and the piece's emotional power, Cronin hopes, will derive from viewers' intuitive comprehension of what is absent.
Recreated on an Ancient Cult statue monumental scale in cold-cast marble, the torso now has a head, arms, and legs hand modeled and cast in resin the pale shade of aquamarine blue green, like beach glass.