Joan Snyder

(American, born 1940)

Joan Snyder is an American painter whose narrative abstractions reflect her interest in personal experiences and the ritualistic process of painting. Similarly to her contemporary Mary Heilmann, Snyder often cites poetry, nature, and daily life as the primary inspirations for her work. “I remember wanting more from Color Field painting and not being moved by Minimal art, which was mostly sculpture at the time,” she reflected. “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.” Born on April 16, 1940 in Highland Park, NJ, she studied at Douglass College for undergraduate school and went on to receive her MFA from Rutgers University in 1966. After finishing school, Snyder began producing works that specifically addressed femininity, embedding materials such as thread and glitter into paintings that resemble female genitalia. In the early 1970s, the artist had begun her most famous series of works, gestural abstractions, which she called Stroke Paintings. Snyder has also participated in the Feminist Movement, founding the Mary H. Dana Women Artist Series in 1971, an organization which continues to champion the work of emerging and established female artists. Snyder currently splits her time between Woodstock and Brooklyn, NY. Today, her works are held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, among others.