Tara Cronin is a New York City-based artist and entrepreneur working in various mediums. She has pursued an art career that has both helped her solve problems in her own internal space as well as in the space she finds herself situated externally, and has professional experience with a handful of startups she has co-founded over the years. Tara received a BA in Writing from New School University, and an MFA in Photography from Bard College and the ICP-Bard Program, and has Twice-earned the International Center of Photography Director’s Fellowship Award in 2008 and 2009. She is proud and appreciative of her education but also places emphasis on the real-world experience she has been able to acquire through hands-on business experience.
During her graduate and post-graduate work, Tara explored this interface between the material and the individual by making photographically-based work involving images or prints combined with materials such as reconstituted hemoglobin and chlorophyllin as well as with dust and with liquid metals. She holds various co-patents with partner and scientist Ed Chen including one on a unique polymer made from those materials used in her artwork. which after scientific research demonstrated itself to be the first synthetic membrane able to remove Carbon Dioxide directly from air and convert it into useful liquids. This resulted in a startup company based on that technology, as well as a solo show in the Museo de la Ciudad in Querétaro [ Museum of the City of Querétaro ], Mexico in 2012, and later an invitation to be a guest-speaker and exhibition participant at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC.
Having exhibited throughout New York City, North America and Internationally, Tara’s recent exhibitions include a group show at the International Center of Photography in New York, NY, a 2-person exhibition at Pictura Gallery in Bloomington, Indiana, and she is always excited to have her artist-books included each year since 2010 through to 2014 at the New York Art Book Fair – her favorite Nyc-event of the year – held at MoMa/PS1 in Long Island City, New York.
Through working with the methods she does, Tara also hopes to promote the idea of Science, Proactivity, and Art as being symbiotic. To her, these things are not separate, and the more we create boundaries between them, the weaker we can become. It is this attitude Tara has carried with her in her efforts to be a productive member of buildNepal.
Tara and Partner Ed Chen have a startup whose goal is to transform traditional skepticism of climate change through an invention that turns CO2 into useful materials, while also promoting the relevance of Art and Science. She served on the Board on that business as well. Tara and Ed have created many other business including a tea business they started in 2003. This past Fall 2014 Tara has released the books of three artists co-published with Schilt Publishing and with her own publication company Magical Thinking Publications, an arts-publication and education organization she co-founded with business partner and artist Joshua Lutz. Tara also hosts and helps to run her co-founded project of the “Fred Talks – Ted Talks with Friends” a monthly lecture series amongst neighbors and peers that includes discussions on the arts, sciences, and any topic in between.
Currently Tara is in the process of starting up a pilot-project with Ed Chen for other technologies he has developed, some of which she also helps to refine. The project is to apply Ed’s agricultural technologies to an existing farm to demonstrate its effectiveness in raising crop yield, making crop production more cost-effective, and also more efficient.
It is from these journeys of building a business from scratch, building her own art practice and further improving it always, that Tara takes with her the things she learned through each journey, and instills that experience into her work with buildNepal. Tara met Souvidhya and the buildNepal team though Ed in 2009/2010.
She hopes to do anything in her capability to help buildNepal’s mission go further and reach broader audiences every day. This includes anything from applying design and artwork contributions, to editing or writing any text, to taking a helping role in any business decisions she is invited to help with. Tara also has broad teaching experience and hopes to someday be a part of builNepal in that way as well.
Believing strongly supportive of a ‘generalist’ attitude toward the one life we have, while Tara’s focus is on her art practice, she readily admits to an eager lay-learner-attitude of various branches of the sciences. This information is as much considered as how that physicality relates to our wordless and complex human experience – she applies both perspectives in her startup endeavors, her daily life, and very much in her artwork.
