Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art: Feminist Art Base: Joan Snyder

Joan Snyder was born on April 16, 1940, in Highland Park, New Jersey. She received her AB from Douglass College in New Brunswick, New Jersey (1962), and an MFA from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey (1966). She was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1974) and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1983).

Snyder’s entrance into the art world began with a series of
Stroke paintings, which shaped her first solo shows in New York City and San Francisco, and were selected for the Whitney Annual (1972), the Whitney Biennial (1973) and the Corcoran Biennial (1975). In 1978 the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, New York, presented a solo exhibition of her work. Since then, her paintings have been shown in numerous gallery and museum exhibitions. They are also included in major museum, corporate, and private collections.

In 2005, the Jewish Museum in New York City presented a
thirty-five year survey of her work, which then traveled to the Danforth Museum in Framingham, Massachusetts. In conjunction with this traveling exhibition, Abrams Books published a monograph entitled Joan Snyder, with an introduction by Norman Kleeblatt and essays by Hayden Herrera and Jenni Sorkin. Other recent museum exhibitions include solo shows at the Allentown Art Museum (1993), Rose Art Museum, The Parrish Art Museum (1994), and The Brooklyn Museum of Art (1998). Although Snyder’s paintings are often placed under various art-movement umbrellas—Abstract Expressionism, Neo-Expressionism, Feminist Art—the changing nature of her work, with its combination of personal iconography, female imagery, aggressive brushwork, and accomplished formalism, has kept her steadily untagged.

Snyder lives in Brooklyn and Woodstock, New York.

"The late 1960s and early 1970s – I remember being on a search of my own, having just come out of graduate school in 1966 and having moved to New York in 1967. I was slowly developing a language with which I could speak and communicate. I loved to paint – it was the very first thing in my life that I had found that I had truly loved to do, and I felt that one day I would be good at it. I remember wanting more from Color Field painting and not being moved by Minimal art, which was mostly sculpture at the time. These were the works that I was challenging – to have more in a painting, not less; to show the anatomy of a painting, the different layers as it was being made, the process. In the late 1960s, I was making 'flock' paintings using flocking (crushed rayon), lentils, thread, paste, and paint. The paintings spoke about women and their bodies. They were anthropomorphic. I slowly moved through these ideas to the 'stroke' paintings. I loved the idea of narrative—being able to express many emotions in one painting, as in a song or symphony.

In the late 60’s women had begun to talk, meet and organize. We were not being recognized or taken seriously, no matter the type or style of artwork we were attempting at the time. I remember calling male painters 'the boys', and I did that for years, because women were excluded from any dialogue at the time. Perhaps this is what allowed me to go my own way, to discover my own language, and to work so independently, just because I felt so excluded.

In 1974, after working on the 'stroke' paintings, I began in earnest to make paintings which had what I referred to as a female sensibility: Small Symphony for Women, Heart On, and another, Vanishing Theatre. In the early 1970s women were forming groups and talking about things political and personal, and about our art. Our dialogues impacted the art world. Women’s work helped to pump the blood back into what were dry, cold, and minimal years in the art world in the late 1960s."

--Joan Snyder, 2007