Joan Snyder is an American painter who represents the abstract expressionism. Through her colourful paintings, she transmits her personal life experience and the communal experiences as well. According to Snyder, her main sources of inspiration are poetry, nature, and everyday life.
Background
Ethnicity:
The parents of Joan Snyder’s father came from Germany and her mother was born to a Russian family.
Joan Snyder was born on April 16, 1940, in Highland Park, New Jersey, United States to a working-class family of Leon D. Snyder, a toy salesman, and Edythe A. Cohen, a bookkeeper.
Joan has an elder brother named Stephen, an aeronautical engineer and author, and a younger sister named Suellen. She is a social worker and therapist.
Education
Joan Snyder attended the Hebrew School in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Later, she became a student of the Douglass Residential College from which she graduated in 1963 with a Bachelor of Arts in sociology.
After four months of introductory painting course, Snyder made a decision to devote her life to painting. To fulfil the goal, she entered the Rutgers University in 1963. Three years later, Snyder obtained her Master of Fine Arts degree.
Joan Snyder started her professional artistic career at the early 1960s when she produced her first landscapes and expressionist portraits. At the middle of the decade, Snyder attacked the theme of the femininity in her artworks by incorporating in them such materials as silk, thread, glitter, seeds and beans symbolizing female genitalia.
In 1967, she joined the teacher’s stuff of the Stony Brook University of New York and spent two years there.
By the early 1970, Snyder elaborated her own painting manner by producing so-called ‘stroke paintings’ with the help of grid. The canvases were presented in 1971 at her debut solo show held at the Paley & Lowe Gallery in New York City. The presentation provided Snyder with the first acclaim and she has received multiple invitations to the women’s exhibitions since then.
These early canvases were later presented in a couple of Whitney Biennials (1973 and 1981) and at the Corcoran Biennial of 1975.
The year of her first solo show, Joan Snyder relocated to a farm in Pennsylvania where she had continued to work till 1980. Soon, her painting became more expressive, personal with music, poetry and words she added to them. Finally, she abandoned her grid system completely and received a status of one of the leading figures in the women’s art movement.
This period, the artist pursued her teaching activity. So, she gave art lessons at such institutions like the Yale University (1974), the University of California in Irvine (1975), the Art Institute of Chicago (1976) and the Princeton University (1975-1977).
In the late 1980s and the 1990s, Snyder’s touched new topics in her artworks of this period. The artist explored the issues of fear, suffering, cruelty and exploitation of women and children in the world, and the AIDS. That can be seen in such canvases as Boy from Africa (1988), Morning Requiem (For the Children) (1987) and Journey of the Souls (1993).
In 1994, the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York, organized the retrospective presenting Snyder’s artworks she had made for twenty-five years. The next huge retrospective took place ten years later at the Jewish Museum in New York City.
Other remarkable shows of this period include the shows at the Zimmerli Art Museum at the Rutgers University in New Brunswick (2011) and at the Franklin Parrasch Gallery in New York City (2015).
Nowadays, Joan Snyder lives and works between Woodstock and Brooklyn, New York.
Joan Snyder consider herself as a person belonging to the Jewish people but she isn’t religious.
Views
Joan Snyder is a strong feminist both in life and in art. Even the choice of the art movement in which she works, abstract expressionism, was conditioned by the fact that this genre is dominated by male artists. In 1971, she established the Mary H. Dana Women Artist Series aimed to promote the artworks of contemporary women artists.
Quotations:
"Making art is, for me, practising a religion. … My work is my pride, creates for me a heritage. It is a place to struggle freely at my altar."
"I felt like my whole life, I had never spoken … had never been heard … had never said anything that had any meaning. When I started painting, it was like I was speaking for the first time."
"I believe my Russian and German heritage had a profound impact on my art. The German angst is a part of me."
"I believe that women artists pumped the blood back into the art movement in the 1970s and the 1980s. At the height of the Pop and Minimal movements, we were making...art that was personal, autobiographical, expressionistic, narrative and political."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"The functions of Ms. Snyder's art, first and foremost, are to further the tradition of painting and to explore the most serious aspects of the human condition; to connect us not only to one another and to nature but to ancient rites and myths. She reminds us that no matter how modern and civilized we are, art can still be raw, primitive and talismanic. Without apologies or decorum, Ms. Snyder's work awakens all of the things still wild within us." Lance Esplund, an art critic
Connections
Joan Snyder became a wife of the photographer Larry Fink on October 12, 1969. Ten years after, the marriage produced one daughter named Molly. Nowadays, she is a documentary moviemaker, painter and writer. Joan and Larry divorced in 1985. Molly gave birth to Snyder’s grandson Elijah in 2011. A year later, Joan Snyder married her partner Margaret Cammer, a retired New York State Acting Supreme Court Judge.