Patricia Cronin On Resisting Self and State Censorship As An Artist

Hi everyone and welcome back to the Artalog hosted by me, Madison Beale. This is the final episode of season four, and I can't believe how quickly that came around. This is quite a full circle episode for me. As some of you may know, I went viral over the summer sharing my reaction to seeing a work of art in person for the first time at the Kelvin Grove Art Gallery. I'm talking, of course, about Memorial to a Marriage. If you don't know what sculpture I'm talking about, I would pause this episode quickly, go take a look, and come back. I dreamed of seeing the sculpture after I'd seen it online as a teenager. Even seeing it on the screen moved me. This idea that when I was born, marriage equality wasn't even something that people believed was possible within this lifetime, and wanted to commemorate it in ways that weren't power of attorney documents. It was able to show me that a lifelong partnership with a woman was possible and something we're celebrating. Patricia Cronin created this beautiful sculpture in variations of marble and bronze to commemorate what should have been a marriage when it was made. Fast forward to now where Patricia Cronin and her wife Deborah Cass are now married, and we can all share a deep moment of gratitude for this work, as well as how far we've come. But the fight's not over, and there's still so much farther to go. Today, Patricia Cronin and I discuss her career so far and how together we can fight back against censorship and authoritarianism through art. Patricia Cronin is an interdisciplinary feminist artist that examines issues of gender, sexuality, and social justice. Major bodies of work focus on the international human rights of LGBTQ persons, women and girls, including Memorial to a Marriage, including Memorial to a Marriage, the world's first marriage equality monument. Cronin's work has been exhibited internationally, with solo exhibitions at institutions including the Tampa Museum of Art, the Flag Art Foundation, the 56th Venice Biennale, the Brooklyn Museum, and the American Academy in Rome. She has also participated in significant group exhibitions around the world and received various prestigious awards and fellowships. Cronin's work is collected by numerous museums, including the Kelvin Grove Art Gallery, the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Perez Art Museum in Miami, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Tampa Museum of Art, and Woodlawn Cemetery. Patricia, welcome to the Artolog. I'm so excited to get to talk to you today.

Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here. What are your earliest memories of art? I grew up in a very devout Catholic family. And so there was a lot of church and it was a big part of our lives growing up. So when I went to college and was studying art and the Italian Renaissance and late medieval to high Baroque, I know so many of those stories. And it was a very easy transition into understanding what the content was of different images and formally how they reinforced that aesthetically, artistically.

And when you were developing as an artist from your childhood into university, what were you interested in exploring? And has that changed? I think I'm really consistent.

Like most young people when they're going to university or college, they're trying to figure out who they are and self-expression, whether it's through some people do tattoos and piercings, and other people do just with fashion or hairstyle and just that self-expression, obviously, when you're studying art, comes out in your artwork as well. And the body has always been so important, you know, who we are individually in society. And then as you experience more of the world, you start seeing that there's a hierarchy that's being imposed by laws, whether they're local or federal. And just you're being socialized into believing things about your gender, your specific voice that you have to start unlearning and detangling so that you can actually be your real self.

Some of your earliest work was a series of erotic Polaroid photographs. And like you said, the body's been a point of interest for you ever since. What is it exactly about the human figure, either in flesh or in sculpture, that draws you to that draws you to it and to create art about it?

I'm when I when I started studying art, and I'm obviously I was come from a very religious family, and you're a woman, and then you're discovering your sexuality, and all of a sudden you're realizing there's this two-tiered status of citizens or just human beings, really. And yet we all have the same things in common, right? We all have brains, we all have feelings, we all have bones, muscles, skin, our corporal bodies, our shared humanity is the thing that I kept insisting on by focusing on my own body and other female bodies in my work. The earliest works that you're talking about from the 1990s, they're erotic watercolors and Polaroids, and I created them in response to the culture wars that was happening in the 1990s. This is a time where AIDS is raging in America. So many political movements for people of color, women and LGBT people were really taking hold. And they consisted of feminist performance-based Polaroid photography and watercolor paintings. And I was trying to deconstruct the heterosexual white male gaze. So I placed myself, like the cultural producer, the artist, simultaneously in the role of the nude female object, which would be the very traditional visual role, and artist subject, which is the untraditional role. And so the work was made from the viewpoint of the artist as participant in the erotic sex acts. And by bringing the viewer into a lesbian erotic space from the perspective of one of the lovers. I'm a great student of art history. I think that's where so many of the great ideas are. And I learned so much from art history. I'm not arrogant enough to think that I'm going to be the one human after centuries and centuries of artists recording their world or expressing themselves for 4,000, 40,000 years that I'm going to come up with some the next absolute movement. And I like the past, it's so important to then be able to understand the world we're living in so we can figure out a path forward. And thinking back then, it was just so heightened. I know we're living in a very heightened political time now. And back then, there was very little difference between who you were having fun with at home, in the bedroom, your lovers, and all the protests we were doing out on the street. It's almost like the walls of all the buildings didn't exist because it was the same kind of expression, whether we were with Act Up, fighting for AIDS research and funding and healthcare, or we were doing WAM, which was the Women's Health Action Mobilization, or WAC, the Women's Health Action Coalition. And then there was just, there were just so many LGBT, now Q organizations and real feminist organizations really out there on the streets demanding equal access and equal protection under the law, which we still don't have. So that's the depressing part. Sorry. But it's why the body still remains such a vital template, artistic form for me to experiment through because we still don't have equal rights. If anything, we have less rights than back then. So you can imagine my hair is absolutely on fire.

I think that's so interesting when you're talking about art historical depictions of lesbianism. Because when you think back, it's Corbet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Solomon. And not only are they all male, they're all casting a very voyeuristic gaze onto a lesbian erotic act. So I think it's really interesting that you take that perspective and change it. Absolutely.

Because all right, so what do you my my question to myself was what do I'm looking, I'm thinking about Corbet's the sleepers. And so if you're our audit listening audience, it's two women fully nude, embroiled in a post-coidal hug, and there's a string of pearls that's broken, and it's in a French interior 19th-century domestic dwelling. And it's very erotic. But I kept thinking to myself, what do I do if I'm one of them? I'm one of the lesbian lovers, but I'm also the cultural producer like Corbet, and I'm on the other side of the room painting them. Now, of course, he was a white, straight man, French, and he painted it for a white straight, a male patron. And I just was thinking, okay, so how do I show what our erotic space could look like? And so that's when I started looking down my own body and taking these Polaroids in different moments of intimacy and then started making the watercolors from them. And yeah, I just I really they're going to be in a show in Madrid in 2027 in a museum, which I'm very excited about. Because you can imagine, or as you can imagine, they're not going to be shown in the United States for some time.

So why Polaroids?

Polaroid film, and I don't know if everybody knows this, but you just click the button and the photograph comes out of the camera. And I oh I almost think it's the original purpose of Polaroid film was this is the film that you don't want to bring to your local film developing place and then go pick up the photographs two days later. I know today with digital photography, many people are not even going to understand what I'm talking about. But it was a very intimate, immediate process that you were in complete control of the whole thing, because it didn't have to go to an external company. It didn't have to go to some random teenage boy developing the film and printing the photographs at the local corner store photo place. And there's something nice about the format because they're almost a square. Some are squares and some are almost squares, depending on what model camera you have. And they're just intimate and you could pass them around and share them with friends. And there's just something really nice about them.

So, along with your love for art history, your work frequently communicates with classical art in particular. What about art history interests you or inspires you?

Oh, wow. I love this question. I never know how to answer it. It's almost like asking a writer, your love of literature, you know so much about the history of literature. What is it about it that makes you, as a writer, so interested in it? It's there has been so much great art made all over the world for so many centuries. It's like I'm a kid in a candy store. This is, it's so primal that human beings have been doing this for so long. And my wife is an artist, Deborah Cass, and we went on a prehistoric cave painting trip in northern Spain and southern France, probably about a decade ago now. And it was absolutely so profound and so moving to be in these underground caves looking at whether it was the animals or the hand prints or the actual contour around the hands, that human beings, it's like this characteristic we have to express ourselves visually. It's the Neolithic age, 40,000 years ago, but that this impulse to visually express yourself or record the world around you dates back that long. It's before written, before writing systems are recorded. It's just so profound. And you go through all the different centuries and different bodies of work and different geographical locations. And it's just such a rich area that we just need to learn more about, I think. And when I'm the most disturbed or uncomfortable, not uncomfortable, so at my wit's end about the current world I'm living in, I think back, been wars before. There's been huge societal upheavals. What were artists doing then? How did they address it? And then I use that to help me figure out okay, then what do I want to say about this moment that I'm living in? And hopefully that can illuminate something to give us some hope for the future. Because right now, to for me at least, it feels quite hopeless.

Why do you think antiquity continues to be relevant in a world that's so different from the context that these grand works of art were produced in?

Oh, that's really a great question. After the 2016 American election, I honestly didn't think I was ever going to be creative again. Because I was like, why are we even educating women? If the human being with the longest CV, the most qualified person ever, loses out to an F minus man. I was just like, I was really terrified this was going to be the end of female ambition because it's you can't outperform inequality, as Megan Rappineau, the famous U.S. soccer player, said on Pay Equity Day during the Biden administration. And I just thought, I don't know, I don't know. I don't know what I'm going to do. And the Tampa Museum just happened to call me then. And they said, we have an antiquities collection and we have a contemporary collection. We've never figured out how to bridge the audiences or the collections. And they came up with this idea like, let's ask a contemporary artist who has some relationship to classical or neoclassical art to come and respond to our antiquities collection. And it included a commissioned new artwork, a solo show, and a catalog. And I thought, okay, because I had made Memorial to a marriage in the 19th-century neoclassical form, like I understood why they thought of me. So I went down to see if they had anything that was gonna inspire me. And I walked in and I saw a first century CE, life-sized torso of Aphrodite, but no head, no arms, and nothing below the knees. And I thought to myself, they're trying to push women out of public life in the United States, and our democracy's on the brink. Aphrodite was one of the two most powerful female figures in the ancient Mediterranean world, the birthplace of democracy. This is a good place for me to put all my attention and my critical thinking, research, skill building. And so I decided to return her to her original cult statue scale. So I made a 10-foot version. I sculpted all the missing parts and tried to reimagine her. And I just thought to have this monumental female figure that was so powerful then, but making it out of resin, a sea, sea green, blue-green, sea glass-like color, resin translucent for the parts I was making, and this opaque coal cast marble for her solid torso. As our ideas about truth and history were starting to get messed with by the first Trump administration, I thought she was the right answer for me then. And it's been a really rich period for me to do a lot of research. I didn't know much more than whatever you learn in university about, except for when you're a kid and you love all the Greek myths. But it was really an interesting time for me to understand and learn more about Aphrodite, that she had not just spiritual authority, she had civic authority. And the idea, it just worked for what I was really sorely lacking in my political American sphere then. I'm really a conceptual artist. I just have some mad skills, right? Artistic skills. So I use different images or forms. I always say I'm looking for the magic three, three out of three. I'm looking for the perfect image or form to match the right materials to reinforce my contemporary content. And if I can get three out of three, that's when I think like the magic really happens. And it has to be for that moment. Like when I made Memorial to a Marriage and it's this over life-size three-ton marble, Carrara marble sculpture that I carved. I made it when same-sex marriage was illegal in the United States. So I'm always addressing some burning issue that is just driving me crazy. And I look out on the cultural landscape on the horizon and I try to see is anybody else covering this? If somebody else is doing this, I'm off the hook and I don't have to. But if no one else is doing it, it's always, oh, okay, I'll learn how to carve marble. Great. It's going to take me three years to do this, but I have to do it. And so either it's the indignity or the oppression or violence or the erasure of women, girls, and LGBT people, and our international human rights that is always the main core thread pushing through all my work. And I just, and painting isn't always the right solution or answer for each moment when this when the issue really comes to a head, and I just have to make something about it.

And you've created work in historical settings like the Church of St. Gallo in Venice. What inspired Shrine for Girls?

It was 2014, and 276 Cheepak school students, all girls, were kidnapped in northern Nigeria, and it just went viral all around the world. It was in the news for months, and it was just driving me insane. Boko Haram translates into Western education is evil. So they don't want girls educated. They just don't. This secondary education costs extra in many countries in the world. And so if you have two children, a male and a female, who are you going to send to the secondary education? So if girls get to go to school, it's a really big deal for their families and for the community. So that drove me nuts when they got kidnapped. Then there was a gang rape and a lynching of two teenage cousins in Uttar Pradesh, a northern province in India, that also made the news about a month later. And I was flying over to Rome. I was a trustee of the American Academy in Rome, and we had a board meeting coming up. And an Italian curator that I'd worked with before wanted me to go up to Venice. He was really interested in proposing a project to Oakwee and Weezer, the commissioner. And so of the 56th Venice Bienale in 2015. And I ran on the plane over. I just happened to see a movie I'd never heard of called Philomena. And it was about the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland. And I grew up Irish Catholic. I was like, I've never heard these. I know nothing about them. So I'm sobbing the whole way over on the plane. It's just they're for listeners who don't know, they're basically forced labor camps. If you had a girl child in your household who, in any way, might jeopardize the moral reputation of the family, whether she was of low mental capacity, if she was promiscuous, if she was pregnant, an unwed, absolutely anything. The families would drop them off with the nuns, the sisters of mercy. And they a lot of times their heads were shaved, their names were taken away, they were given numbers. Does this sound familiar? And this was run by the Catholic Church, and they would work them, poorly nourished, never educated, and it was an indefinite sentence. Anyway so they're just these horrible places. And I'm sitting outside the church that the curator, Ludovico Pratesi, wanted me to look at. I'd already been in and met with them, but I was just sitting outside thinking, what could I do? What would be the right artwork for me to make for this moment in 2015 in Venice, where so many countries come from all over the world to some would say, Display some propaganda. Other countries say this is the best artist that we think we have this year, or something like that. It's the Olympics of the art world. And a group of Indian tourists were going into their hotel, and there were grandfathers and grandchildren and parents. And I was thinking, oh, I wonder what they think about what happened to Murti and Pushpa, the two teenage cousins that got murdered last week. And I was thinking, boy, these girls, it's just so terrible what's happening to them. They need a shrine in their honor. And then I was the light bulb went off, and it was like shrine for girls. Inside is the Chiesa di San Gallo, it's the smallest church in Venice. It's right near San Marco. You can't put anything on the walls. It's deconsecrated, but it the Diocese of Venice still owns it. And but there's three altars, and you can use the three altars. And I thought I have three stories burning a hole in my head between the Cheebox students, the cousins in India, and the Magdalene Laundries. And it was really important that there's a critique here, obviously, of religion's role in subjugating 50% of their congregants. But and I thought, I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna bring three, three of, three of some of the major religions under one roof in a Catholic church in Venice, in Italy, a Catholic country. And when I met Don Caputo, who is the priest who's in charge of all 200 churches in Venice, he said, absolutely, I understand. We I said, because you understand the Magdalene Laundries were run by all Catholic institutions. He said, Yes. And we welcomed the dialogue. They were into it. So it was really great. So basically, I took clothing from three of the different locations. So I had colorful saris from India. I commissioned someone from the UK, a costume seamstress who was just transitioning into doing her own apron company. And I sent her all the historical photographs of all the different Magdalene laundries and so figured out how many in wool, how many in cotton, how many in linen, which sizes, because some of them are very small, the girls, and some were 18 to 23. And then I also got hijabs from a local, I live right near a Muslim neighborhood, and an Ahmed at his store sold me his. And I placed them just very, I don't want to elegantly, so they're rounded. It's a pile, but it doesn't look like dirty laundry, it doesn't look like refuse, but it also doesn't look like you're in a clothing store where they're folded neatly. There's a bit of an arabesque, a little brokeness that happens to each of the piles, depending on if they're made out of nylon and polyester or natural fibers or like that. And then off to this side of each altar, I placed a photograph of from one of the different horrific events. So depending on each viewer's speed and how they comprehend visually their narrative arc, they might not even see the photograph. They might notice it afterwards. And I have to say, and I had a big sign outside of the church, and it said shrine for girls, and then it said shrine for in English, and then it said shrine for girls in the 12 most frequently spoken languages in the world, because we're at Venice, where everyone comes from all over the world. And I wanted people to understand this is not a problem in just these three places. This is a problem everywhere, and I'm speaking to everyone, and everyone is invited in to our hopefully big tent where we can do something about this hateful misogyny.

Another work of incredibly important activist art that you made was Memorial to a Marriage, which has become very important for a lot of queer people, including myself. Can you tell me a bit about this piece? What inspired it, and how you went on to create it?

This is in 2000. I'm walking around New York City. I notice a lot of monuments. This is before anybody's interested in monuments, by the way, way before this is almost 25 years ago. And I'm looking for specific women to be honored in public. And in all of Manhattan, there was a bust of gold in my ear, there was Eleanor Roosevelt and Joan of Arc on a horse, and then Alice in Wonderland and Mother Goose. So in all of Manhattan, there were three real women and two storybook characters. I'm not counting the allegorical women, like Lady Liberty in the Harbor or Lady Justice at a courthouse or victory leading General Sherman. I wanted specific women, and same-sex marriage is illegal, and also women artists and LGBTQ plus artists aren't really given the opportunity very often to make permanent public art. So I had these two issues: no public monuments to us. So we're invisible in the public square, and same-sex marriage is illegal. So I just didn't understand how radical it was back then. But now when I think about it, I think about the audacity that I had this like radical imagination to just envision a world without misogyny or homophobia. What would a monument look like? And because I was looking for specific women, and I'm looking at all these after the Civil War, there's all these, especially up north, because of course we won. Our General Sherman is on a horse, and even the horse is specific, but the woman is victory. But it's made by Augusta St. Gowdens and all the artists that were making these major monuments, they're also making sculptures for cemeteries. So when I get to the cemetery in 1963 to 65, it's the height of the rural or garden cemetery movement in the United States, based on the ones in Europe. And I thought, here's where I finally found specific women honored in public. And there's four premier versions of these cemeteries: Mount Auburn in Boston, Mount Laurel in Philadelphia, and then two in New York, a Greenwood in Brooklyn, and Woodlawn up in the Bronx. And up in the Bronx, it's designed as America's Pierre-La Chaise, right? Mausoleums made by the best architects of the robber baron days. So it's like JP Morgan and the Guggenheims and the Fricks. It's just incredible. And there's also Madame CJ Walker, the first African-American millionaire, and all the jazz people are there. There's a huge, there's a lot of people from died of AIDS. There's a lot of people from COVID. It's very, it's non-denominational and just a very wonderful place. And when I got there, I thought, okay, I'm gonna pretend, since I'm pretending homophobia and misogyny don't exist, I'm going to meet my absence in the public square and my absence at being a second-class legal citizen because we can't get legally married. There's one more thing. Back then, before, while it was illegal, you had to, if just to simulate just a few of the 1200 benefits of legal heterosexual marriage, a lot of gay couples would drop wills and healthcare proxies and power of attorney documents. They're the most depressing documents you're ever going to have in your life because if it's about only about if one of you becomes incapacitated or dies, that's it. So if all I'm gonna be legally afforded is death, then the cemetery is the right place for me to put my monument. So I bought our burial plot. Or as I tell all my women artist friends, if you want permanent public art, you've got to buy the land. Because the city isn't gonna give it to you. They're not gonna give us these opportunities. The federal government isn't going to. I had to take it into my own hands. So that's how I end up with a burial plot in Woodlawn Cemetery. And it was it's purchased on a pre-need, they call it, basis. And so it's over three tons of Carrara marble because I was answering my absence. Absence is zero. It's air, it's nothing. And I thought, what should it be made out of? The absolute opposite of that. So it's made out of Carrara marble. For centuries, artists' most endurable, heavy, solid material, going back centuries, but also I decided because Woodlawn is inaugurated in 1863, it's in the middle of the 19th century, and I thought it should be the American neoclassical form. So to address a federal failure, I used this very patriotic American neoclassical form. And so that's why it's neoclassical. That's why it's permanent, is because it's on my burial plot. And I just thought, I'm just going to be hopeful and envision us after a long life together. This will be our final resting place. And when it was first installed, there was a big article on the New York Times, and it was written by, I was interviewed by someone who was very suspicious of the whole project. They, I don't think they weren't an art person. They were coming at it from a different point of view, but they thought it was some like avant-garde kind of attention-grabbing PR stunt. And obviously didn't understand the history of sculpture in America. I'm returning it to its original American venue, the cemetery. But he also didn't quite, I kept saying, no, this is really where we're going to be buried. This isn't a joke. This is real. The thing I think about is look, we all know we're going to die. And I get to make, and I find great comfort in having something official about the two of us, right? That's all I could have back then. But also, I find comfort in knowing where I'm going to end up. And I get to ask myself questions, like between whenever that is, which nobody knows, and today, what kind of person do I want to be? What kind of choices do I want to make? What kind of art do I want to make? And I'm going to fill in those years with as much great artwork as I can. And I like that it's an anti, it's like an anti-monument. It's not the water, it's not an obelisk, phallic obelisk piercing the sky. We're hugging each other and we're hugging the ground. I'm pointing you in the direction I want you to focus on. Because we started the beginning of the conversation. This is what we all have in common. Our bodies, each other. We're all made up of the same ingredients. And we all come into the world one way and we all are going to leave the world, also. And it's what do you want to do? What's that Marilyn Robinson quote? What will you do with your one precious life? And I just want to make the best art I can the whole time.

That's so beautiful.

How are people responding to it almost 25 years later? It's so interesting because when I first unveiled it, it was a protest piece. It was the most poetic protest piece I could come up with. Or as I like to say, it's like when a love song and a political song are rolled into the same song. That's how I think about it. So it was a protest piece. And then in 2011, New York State legalized same-sex marriage. So Deborah and I got married the first day you could in New York State. And then in 2015, the SCOTIS decision, which nobody saw coming, I thought I had made this for an audience that wasn't even born yet. I really was like, because people laughed at me, museum directors, hey Patty, what are you working on? And I would tell them, and they just would just think it was so hilarious. But I knew I was right and I knew they were wrong. And I'm sure I turned bright purple. But I was like, my wife says, if you're on the right side of history, you're usually on the wrong side of power. And I thought, yeah, I'm on the right side of history. This is uncomfortable. It's gonna be hard. I'm like a salmon swimming upstream, but we're gonna get it done. So then it became more of a celebration piece. As soon as the Supreme Court decision happened, O'Burgerfeld v. Hodges. Now there were pride tours. I mean, there's trolley tours and walking tours, historic tours all throughout Woodlawn. For the longest time, we were the third most visited plot. It was Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and then us. Now obviously we're still alive, knock on wood, and we're not famous jazz musicians. And then Celia Cruz died, and she's a huge salsa star. And so now we're further down on the list, which is absolutely fine. But I just love that we're on every tour. We're on the veterans tour, we're on the jazz tour, the Victorian tour. It's just really funny. But as soon as that Supreme Court decision happened, they started doing a Pride Tour. And the NYC LGBT historic sites does a Pride Tour every June, and the inclusive LGBTQ flags are put on all existing known people from our community. So it's really great. And then the second Trump administration. It's a lot more tense now. So rights are absolutely being taken away. There's something like, I actually did a check two weeks ago. There's something like 616 anti-LGBT bills had been proposed across the United States in 2025 alone. They are going full throttle on this. They want to erase women and to reinscribe really traditional controls on women, you have to go after LGBT people, right? If they want only two sexes, male, female, that's it, no other expressions, no other genders, which is absolutely bonkers, of course, then you can't have them hanging in museums. And you can't, we've got to it's like Mussolini removed the word homosexual from the Italian dictionary during his reign. It's they're going to try to erase us every way they can. So to make us illegal, to criminalize our mere existence and participation in civic life. It's so the piece is becoming more of a protest piece again, and I'm sure it will continue in that path because of our Supreme Court makeup right now and for the foreseeable future is going to be an adversarial one to anybody's idea about human decency and fairness and all human beings being created equal, unfortunately.

With tensions mounting across the United States, particularly in museums under the current administration, we're seeing so many more marginalized voices being silenced. Of course, you're familiar with this, with Memorial to a Marriage being um a flashpoint. How can artists fight back against censorship?

Yeah, that's a great question. So there was the first day, as I just mentioned, the executive order saying there's only two sexes. Um there's so many issues for so many people. But March 27th, 2025, there was a second executive order targeting the Smithsonians specifically. And because of full-size bronze of Memorial to a marriage is in the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery collection, they acquired it in I think 2013. It was on view for about two and a half years. It wasn't taken, Trump did not take it down, but it was in a new acquisition, acquisitions exhibition, and then it was in another exhibition, eye-to-eye, self-portraits from the collection from 1900 to today. And then that traveled around the country for a while. So it's been very visible at the Smithsonian. It's still on their website. I guess they haven't figured out to really activate. They like to obloviate. They'll do this kind of demonstrative executive order and make a lot of hoopla about it. And then because they fired so many people, and the people that they have hired are so many of them who are so incompetent, they can't really follow through. My hope is that they can't follow through on a lot of things that they're saying they're going to do. But in the meantime, they still get the job done. When they targeted the Smithsonian and said specifically the entire history of African Americans, they're just, they just want to get rid of all of it and say that slavery was good. It's such an abomination of truth in history and culture. And they're really upset about the National Women's Museum, which is barely a website at this point. They're not too keen on a Hispanic museum, an Indigenous museum. The Smithsonian is the Americas, I should clarify this. Sorry, I didn't do it earlier. It's a 21 museum system. It includes an air and space museum. It includes a zoo, you know, it's so it's, but it also includes an African-American history and culture museum. And so they're going after all the feminist BIPOC and LGBTQ art that they can in these places. And by threatening those, they are sending a message to every other museum in the United States. Do not exhibit this work, don't collect it, don't conserve it, don't research it, no scholarship, no catalogs. And it's working. I've had two solo museum shows canceled between now and 2028 in the United States. And one of them, the curator, had been working on it for a year and a half. The curator isn't very happy either. And by doing that, I mean, you can't push people out of public life and still have us hanging in the museum. And if especially when you're trying to rewrite the past and say that none of this stuff happened. So it's very so I just wanted to lay the groundwork there right now. So how to fight censorship? We have a national public radio here, and I did a small segment there about censorship and my work in particular in the Smithsonian collection. And then it's very interesting. European EU news, culture, and politics channels or shows started calling me for interviews. And I was zooming with one of the producers from ZDF, German station, and she said, We emailed 20 people, museum directors, curators, artists. You're out of the 20, you're the only one that responded. And I was in shock. I'm like, don't they know where this is headed? Don't they know how serious this is? And she said, they're too scared. Finally, a few would go on background, but would not be named. It wouldn't go on camera. And because Memorial to a Marriage is so legibly and visibly LGBTQ content. And if I didn't describe it properly earlier in the segment, I'm sorry, it's two over life-sized female figures nude from the hips down with a twirling fabric, and our toes are touching one foot, one big toe and one big toe, and we are embracing on a slightly inclined marble mattress with a shared blow. And it's just, and we just look like we're at sleep. But that adult intimacy, anybody who's had it will recognize it for sure. But because it's so visibly, you know, LGBT content, this is not geometric abstraction. And then on the wall label it says I'm a queer artist. So I'm proud to stand next to it. I'm not afraid. And I keep saying, courage is as courageous as cowardice. We just need more people to be courageous and speak up and any chance you can to fight censorship. I'm I am worried though, because the executive order is scaring the museums. So then their trustees aren't going to buy my work. That means commercial galleries are gonna start doing fewer shows of queer artists, of black artists, of indigenous artists, of Asian artist. They're gonna just keep doing fewer and fewer shows, which the thing this is the thing I'm really the most afraid of is that this trickle down of censorship will have artists self censoring themselves in their own studios. And I'm just terrified. What part of American artistic human expression is going to be lost now because it's never going to be made. That's the chilling, I have goosebumps. That's the chilling trajectory that we're headed on and we're probably already in the middle of.

And speaking of the future of art, you also teach at Brooklyn College. How do you balance making art with teaching?

Oh wow. Yes, I'm very I do love teaching. I always say if I'm not going to be in my studio talking to myself about my work, the only other place I want to be is in a young artist's studio talking to them about their work. It's a great question. I just never thought of it that way. Because basically I lead by example. I wouldn't say demanding, but strongly encouraging them to be courageous with their work and really tell me who they are with their work. It's not like I'm behind hiding behind a whole career of like decorative wallpaper. And I tell them I grew up in a middle class, lower middle class family. We didn't have much money. And there are no artists in my family. So if I can figure out how to do this, I'm hoping they can too. Now, Brooklyn College, I'm a distinguished professor of art at Brooklyn College. Brooklyn College is one of 25 colleges in the City University of New York system. We're a four-year senior college, and it's all devised. There are five boroughs in New York City so that each borough has a four-year senior school, maybe a technical college, there's one law school, there's one CUNY grad center for all the PhD people in Manhattan. There's always at least one, sometimes two community colleges, two-year schools. So it's all accessible. And while education certainly costs more here than other places, being teaching at a public university is very exciting. And it's thrilling because even though it's still a lot of money, it's about$7,000,$7,500 for undergraduate tuition per year and$11,000 for graduate school, which compared to many other schools in New York City, it is a fraction of the price. And most students receive financial aid. So that's fantastic. But the undergraduates are, I'd say about 90% immigrants are first-generation Americans. So they're from all over the place, which is one of the most dynamic classrooms or studios you can walk into because everyone's got such an interesting background and story. And when you walk on the campus at Brooklyn College, you're in the real New York. And I've taught at Yale, I've taught at Columbia and every art school from Boston to Baltimore. It's like I'm still in New York City when I'm on my campus, which I love. So that's just, it's just thrilling. But to balance it, it's like I just tell them you just have to work as hard as possible. Maybe people won't like what you have to say about being you or what you think about the world we live in. But you have to speak truth to power. This is your voice. We're in a democracy. Is it really still a democracy? Yes, that is debatable, but I'm just gonna keep going with this script for now because I want to give them some courage, some support to speak up. I'm trying to improve all their artistic skills, obviously. But then the critical thinking and finding their own voice is really important. What have been some career highlights for you so far? Oh, I think you've touched on my two favorites. Memorial to a marriage, for sure. I'm the reason why I get to be a distinguished professor is because of memorial to a marriage. Making that kind of contribution to the field. I'm like I said, I made it for myself. I had no idea what it was going to mean for other people. And then it be, I didn't know when I was making it it was the first marriage equality monument, but that's how it's known now. So it's, and it's true. You keep Googling, there aren't any others. It's still the only. Come on, people, we need more. And Shrine for Girls, having a solo, official solo collateral show at the 56th Venice Biennale, where it had to be chosen by the Diocese of Venice and Oakley and Weezer, a very important international curator, was really the high point. And I think it's because my work gets under people's skin. I think I'll just give one example with Shrine for Girls. I was being interviewed by the BBC one day, so we're we had to cordon off the door entrance to the church. So the acoustics would be good. A group of Indian women tourists were walking by. There was about maybe 15, a dozen or 15 of them. And they were there. They weren't for the Biennale. They were there to visit the city of Venice. And they read Shrine for Girls in Hindi. They saw the high altar with the saris on it. They went back to their hotel. They went through all their luggage and they found the one black sari they were traveling with for mourning and came back and gave it to me to add to the altar. And I thought, that's it. This is how I define success. There was no press release in Hindi. It was like my work communicated across geographical boundaries and language barriers. What more can you ask of an artwork? I'm like, so between that and memorial to a marriage, that I'm very proud of, I sleep well at night with those two bodies of work in particular. I also wrote the catalog resume on the first professional female sculptor, Harriet Hosmer, who is also a lesbian. And I've had some really great solo museum shows. There's been two surveys of my work so far, two different tenure surveys. So I don't know that there'll be another one coming anytime soon, but I'm just going to keep making the work and eventually people will catch up.

What have been some harder moments and how did you overcome them?

Oh God, do you overcome them? That is a good question. Most the thing is to make such good work. Those two high points that I mentioned were they carry me through a lot of the lower moments because I'll say, okay, but you made memorial to a marriage. It's it's I'm not part of the, what do you call it, like the New York City auction house commercial, trendy, I don't know, whatever you want to. I'm not like an art market darling, I guess is the best way to say it. And it's not because of anything I've done. It's just that the galleries that are showing those artists are not interested in, or let's put it this way, let's their customers, their oligarchs and billionaire collectors, let's just face it, mostly all men, are not interested in my specific lesbian, feminist, queer, international human rights of women and girls and LGBT people themed work. And I'm not gonna make work to make them feel better about themselves. That's not the job of the art of art or artists. Art is supposed to show you what art can be, not make very uber wealthy people more happy with themselves. That's not my goal. Art is how we used to evaluate civilizations. It's yeah, I can't make prestigious wallpaper. It's not my DNA. You know, the only other thing I can say about when you are being passed over, like lots of artists are don't have galleries. I know outside of the US, a lot of people think, oh, all American New York artists have galleries. No, most of us don't have galleries. And to keep working through the low moments when maybe you're unclear or unsure about what you're doing, or you're really clear and sure, but the tastemakers, the gatekeepers aren't interested in what you have to say. How do you keep going? You need an inner core of steel. You need to make work that is so important to you that or as or as President Biden, his question was always, what will you lose for? What are you willing to lose for? What's so important? What are you what where's your character? What are your real values? And if you're willing to lose for those, that making that work is really rewarding. And making it for the future, making it for future audiences because I just hope future audiences are going to be smarter than the ones I got now. And Nancy Pelosi would ask to every new congressperson that got elected and came into Congress, she'd say, What's your why? Why are you here? Okay, yeah, you're interested in, I don't know, prenatal health or something. Why? So I think there's flip sides of the same coin. But as long as I'm making work that I know is important, I know needs to be said, I want future audiences to look back. I don't want them to say, what was wrong with those Americans? Didn't they know the country was getting burned to the ground and nobody said anything? My work will be there to say, oh yeah, I knew, and I wasn't silent, and I did speak up and I tried. It's I'm just not a gatekeeper. I'm the one off by to the side observing. This is what I hope art is, or what I think art might be. The artist looks out, sees the world as incomplete, and tries to respond. You need to contemplate and then respond. I just hope, and that's all you can ask, I think.

What are you working on right now? What are you working on right now? And what can people look forward to in the next couple of years from you?

I just had a my first exhibition. This is an example of not being an art market, darling. My first solo exhibition in New York in almost a decade was this fall. It was called Army of Love. So you'll see I'm keeping up with my theme. There's just too much hate out there. My goodness. And I thought I wasn't done with Aphrodite. And I thought, the world is so ugly, especially here in the in Trump land. And when I walked into my studio every morning and I was met with these eight-foot-tall, powerful female figures or ghosts of Aphrodite, because some of them are very ethereal and more painting the silhouettes and the sea foam around her, I could breathe, I could relax, and I felt safe. And I don't think you can really be creative if you don't feel safe. And so to make I again making work that I needed myself. And so then I so I just had the Army of Love at Chart Gallery in Tribeca. And all my professional opportunities that that have not been canceled and that are coming are all in Europe right now. So that's really interesting. And I'm just in the middle of organizing my thoughts around that. I feel very fortunate to have been an American, to have been born here, and to a family with great values, those kind of like 70s Jesuit social justice values. I'm so lucky that I was instilled with them. My work ethic is I'm a first generation American, which is great. So I work really hard. And I'm just surprised. Not surprised. I'm so disgusted with the direction and the vitriol and the vulgarity and the cruelty of this country that my values aren't aligned with them, and they're letting me know that professionally is okay. Because I'm not like that. And Europe, where I seem to have more values in common, they're the ones that want to show my work, or I just got offered an amazing residency, and it's really great. So the next few years, there's going to be more time spent in Europe for sure. Yeah. I need some sanity.

If you could give any advice to budding artists, what would you tell them?

I would say trust yourself as much as possible. Tune out trying to make money. Get a good day job. I have a wonderful day job. My teaching job is, I might have one of the best teaching jobs in all of the United States, honestly. And I got it because I made work that people found it quite significant. It's really important to make important work. It's really important to trust yourself. If you're going to speak truth to power, your artistic skills have to be 120%. You want to say something that the power elite don't want to hear and don't want to know about, you execute something poorly, that's going to be their excuse to write you off. You're giving them the out, the reason to reject you. If it's done really well, then they have to come up with something else. So it's really important. The critical thinking has to be really high. Your knowledge of art history has to be really high. And your artistic painting, sculpting, whatever it is, has to, all of that has to be at the highest level. And then you can say whatever you want. And that's real freedom. That is real freedom. And it's so important because in a moment of so much censorship, which censorship is never neutral, remember. Censorship is to control the most dangerous people, the people who will criticize the king. So whether you're a writer, a poet, a playwright, and painter, sculptor, video performance, what web, digital art, what a musician, a composer, whatever it is, you just have to do it. You have to keep doing it. And now with Instagram, with I know a lot of people on TikTok, whatever your medium is, make your own YouTube channel, but just get it out there. You can get it out there. And the other thing is maybe start being a good part of the community too. Like not everybody lives in New York. Duh. So what if you live in a town that maybe has one little community gallery? Well, find all the artists in the neighborhood and say, let's meet there Friday night and let's just look at the show and talk about it. Or then you can start, I don't know, BYOB or Little Potluck, or maybe someone can decide, you know what? I'm gonna write a review about that show. And you can create an artistic community anywhere. The artists are everywhere, right? Some of it's just like everyone raising their hand saying, Oh, yeah, I'm here. And just all of us knowing it so that we can find our people. And coming together is really important, especially in authoritarian times, because they want to separate us and make us feel isolated and powerless. And we're not. So getting everybody together. And maybe you just may oh, the other thing is let's say there isn't a gallery, right? Maybe it's a little place. How about you just go visit everybody's studio once a month? Just pick a studio ever and everybody go and have that conversation and that discourse. It's like it could be like the studio artist visit version of a book club. Maybe not everybody even needs to be an artist, maybe just someone who's interested or curious. Everything's a teaching moment, and we can bring people along. And yeah, open up the aperture, the lens, the net, whatever you want to call it. Getting people together and talking in this moment of so much upheaval and crisis and rage, being with people, and sometimes it doesn't matter if you don't even agree, because that's going to be part of the solution too, we know. But just take care and communicate and gather. I think that's really important now.

Patricia, thank you so much for your time today. This has been an incredible conversation, and I feel so grateful that we had the time to sit down and talk today.

Oh, thank you, Madison. I'm so honored to be on your podcast. And uh yeah, just uh good luck to everybody. Stay strong, stay safe, stay sane.