Elli Crocker

About the Artist

Elli Crocker is a native Bostonian and currently maintains a studio in Waltham, MA. She received her B.A. from Smith College and M.F.A. from Tufts University in a collaborative program with the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. She studied with artists Vaino Kola, Susan Heideman, Barnet Rubenstein, Gerry Bergstein, Henry Schwartz, and David Carbone. Ms. Crocker also took workshops with artists Gregory Gillespie and Hanneline Rogeberg. A representational painter with experience doing private (primarily portrait) and public commissions, Crocker welcomes inquiries about her work (contact information).

Ms. Crocker’s work has focused primarily on the human figure and she has pursued this focus through several conceptual series documented on this site, Humans and Beings, Constellations, Signs of Life, Insomnia, Please Don’t Go, and Sight Unseen. Some consistencies in approach will be apparent despite excursions into new media or themes. A connecting thread is human relationship. She is also exploring the animal as “other” (Bestiary), as well as portraying flowers and fruit, which have ancient associations with the life cycle (Botanicals/Sacred Geometries).

With a thirty-year exhibition record, Ms. Crocker’s work has been shown at the Boston Center for the Arts, the Worcester Art Museum, the Anchorage Museum of History and Art (AK), Corvallis Art Center (OR), Weir Gallery (CA), and La Laterie Gallerie (Strasbourg, France) among many other venues. Rice/Polak Gallery in Provincetown, MA represents her work. Significant public commissions have been the 2000 Millennial Mural for Newton North High School and Windows on Allston for the Allston Village Main Streets Association (City of Boston) and Jack Young Company in 2002. She has received grants/funding from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the St. Botolph Foundation, the New England Foundation for the Arts/Visible Republic Program, the Higgins School of Humanities at Clark University, and a Boston Sister City Travel Grant. Her work has been published in two books, The Art of Lovemaking, and Yellow Silk: Erotic Arts and Letters and was included in Volume #50 (2004) of New American Paintings. Her art is also on the cover and six images are printed in the Spring/Summer 2010 edition of Wild Apples, a literary journal that focuses on nature. 

In addition to her work as an artist, Ms. Crocker is a Professor of Art at Clark University in Worcester, MA. She teaches Painting, Figure Drawing, Studio Topics, Senior Thesis, and an on-site drawing class, Sense of Place. She served as Director of the Studio Art Program from 2002–2015 and Gallery Director at Clark from 2002–2007, 2010–11, and is once again running the gallery as of the 2016/17 academic year.