Two Artists Reflect on the Contemporary Memorial:
Patricia Cronin - Memorial To A Marriage and Judith Shea – Legacy Collection.

Patricia Cronin - Memorial To A Marriage
A few years ago Grand Arts, the Kansas City based non-profit art projects institution, invited me to make a dream sculpture project. I had just finished aseries of bronze horses, and I started looking around New York City at all of the public equestrian monuments. In these 19th century war memorials, themen were specific, the horses were particular, but, alas, the women were ALL allegorical. I loved these sculptures but found them lacking. I tried to findimages of women in public that were particular. In Manhattan the only sculptures of specific women I could find were: a statue of Eleanor Roosevelt, abust of Golda Meir, Joan of Arc (on a horse), and then, Alice in Wonderland, and Mother Goose! That was it. Three real women in all of Manhattan andthen two story book characters. The same artists who made the monumental war memorials also made art for cemeteries, the original American venuefor sculpture. For example, Augustus Saint Gaudens’ Adams renowned monument “Adams Memorial” (1886) commissioned by Henry Adams in honorof his wife Marian Hooper Adams is in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D. C. and his “Sherman Monument” (1903) is at 59th Street and 5thAvenue at Central Park in New York, NY. Soon I was researching cemeteries and the “Garden” or “Rural” Cemetery Movement, as it was known, wheremen, women and children are specifically remembered.
In addition to correcting a glaring omission I decided to address a federal failure, the prohibition of gay marriage in the U.S. Since the FederalGovernment won’t accept any individual states’ Civil Union or Marriage Certificates for same sex couples my partner and I had lawyers draw up legal
documents (wills, health care proxies and power-of-attorney, etc.) in an attempt to simulate some of the legal protections of heterosexual marriage.
These documents are depressing because their only usefulness is if one of us becomes incapacitated or dies. It’s not about our life together; it’s about
the end of it. Since I was only officially afforded was death, I decided to make an elegant and dignified monument to our relationship. I chose anationalist form, 19th century American Neo-Classical sculpture, to address what I consider the federal failure to give gay Americans the basic humanright of legal marriage.
With the Grand Arts grant, I made “Memorial To A Marriage,” an over life-size 3- ton Carrara marble mortuary sculpture is a double portrait of my partner(the artist Deborah Kass) and me. I studied the Western history of sculpture, which is pre- occupied with death and remembrance, the cemeteries ofParis, and the history of dying in the United States. “Memorial To A Marriage” was installed on our actual burial plot in Woodlawn Cemetery, designed as
America’s Pere Lachaise, in Bronx, New York. Deitch Projects represented the project and assisted in the purchase of our plot in Woodlawn Cemeterywhere it will be on view through eternity. The marble statue has just been moved in doors to protect it from the elements and a bronze version is there
now. The statue addresses issues of lesbian invisibility, gay marriage, love and loss, and power and status. In death I make official
my “marriage” which is still not legal while we are alive.