December 1997: Forty works on paper created by Joan Snyder over the course of the past decade will be presented as a part of the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s ongoing Working in Brooklyn series. Joan Snyder: Working in Brooklyn will be on view in the Prints, Drawings, and Photographs Galleries from March 6, 1998, through June 14, 1998.
Although Joan Snyder began her career in the 1960s as an abstract painter, she gradually incorporated highly autobiographical, intensely personal material into her work. In the 1970s she began to create feminist paintings combining text and female symbols and became a spokesperson for feminist art. Most recently, influenced by events such as the death of her parents and her daughter’s transition to adulthood, she has explored the cyclical nature of life, often using images dealing with the loss of family and friends.
Among those works in the exhibition are a series from an AIDS portfolio (1993); an oil stick, graphite, and ink on paper work, Black Pond Drawing (1991); a large-scale monoprint, ...And Acquainted with Grief (1997–98); and a lithograph, etching, and wood relief, Our Foremothers (1995).
Over the years she has employed a wide range of materials, often using a combination of mediums and techniques. She has tended to concentrate on one type of printmaking at a time, turning to etchings in the 1970s and woodcuts in the 1980s. In recent years her preference has been for monoprints, although she occasionally works in other media.
In monoprinting Snyder has found a type of printmaking that is consistent with her painterly and expressive style when working on canvas. In a monoprint the artist paints onto a surface that becomes the matrix for a transfer process. Once the image is transferred to paper the artist may continue to add to the image, allowing it more complexity of detail.
For the past several years Joan Snyder has lived and worked in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the United States. It is also in private and public collections, among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Phillips Collection, Washington, D. C.
Joan Snyder: Working in Brooklyn has been organized by Marilyn Kushner, Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Public Information. Press releases, 1995 - 2003. 1997, 163-164.
