Susan Read Cronin

Bio

Susan Read Cronin commenced studying sculpture with noted sculptors Jane B. Armstrong and Walter Matia in the mid-1990s, quickly developing a sense of the tradition and craft involved in working in bronze. Cronin works in her home studios in Manchester, Vermont, and Santa Barbara, California. She fabricates her bronzes at foundries in Vermont and California.

In addition to mastering the compositional demands of traditional figural sculpture, Cronin has brought to her art a playful sense of humor, which has remained at the core of the work in design and art throughout her career. In a world where most art is to be looked at and not touched, Cronin has a unique point of view. She seeks to engage and amuse the viewer of her art, argues that art should be lived with, and even played with, as she often does herself when devising new compositions and groupings for her work.

Since showing her work in her first solo exhibition in 2000, a composite show of her sculptures entitled Fables, Foibles and Fairytales has traveled to eighteen different museums and venues. Galleries nationwide represent her and her pieces populate many private and public collections. Cronin is an Artist Member of the prestigious Copley Society of Boston, and an Associate Member of the National Sculpture Society, where she occasionally shows her work.

Susan Read Cronin was educated at The Madeira School, McLean, Virginia, and is a graduate of Williams College (B.A., English), Williamstown, Massachusetts, where she claims to have developed her passion for art design because the reading was minimal and no papers were due. During the 1980s she founded and operated Suzo, a mail-order company that designed, manufactured and marketed costumes for children (Ms. Magazine named one of Cronin’s creations, Suzo’s Bat Cape, one of the 10 Best Toys of 1985). She has served on the board of the Vermont Studio Center since 2002 and is the author of Bronze Casting in a Nutshell.

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