Joan Snyder

Born April 16, 1940, in Highland Park, NJ, Joan Snyder received her A.B. from Douglass College, New Brunswick, NJ, in 1962 and her M.F.A. from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, in 1966. Joan Snyder was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1974, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1983. In 2007, Snyder received a MacArthur Fellowship. She currently lives in Brooklyn and Woodstock, NY.

Joan Snyder first gained public attention in the 1970’s with her elegant, abstract “stroke paintings”. These paintings were included in the Whitney 1973 Biennial and the Corcoran 1975 Biennial, and were the basis of her first solo shows in New York City and San Francisco. Often called an autobiographical or confessional artist her subjects range from the landscape to love, death, motherhood, sex and politics. Her paintings, with their exquisite use of color, frequently contain text as well as materials, including herbs, mud, silk, straw, flowers, and seeds.

Snyder’s work is in many public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, The New York City Jewish Museum, The Guggenheim, The High Museum of Art and The Phillips Collection. In 2005, The Jewish Museum in New York City presented a 35-year survey of her work. Abrams Books published a monograph, Joan Snyder, in conjunction with the exhibition. In 2011, Dancing With The Dark: Joan Snyder Prints 1963-2010, a traveling retrospective of Snyder’s prints, opened at the Zimmerli Art Museum in New Jersey accompanied by a monograph with essays by Faye Hirsch and Marilyn Symmes, co-published by DelMonico Books/Prestel and Zimmerli Art Museum.