Joan Snyder

Joan Snyder was born in 1940 in Highland Park, New Jersey to Edythe and Leon Snyder, the descendants of Russian-Jewish and German-Jewish immigrants, respectively. She grew up painting, encouraged by her father, who had painted as a young man. Although she had a studio in her family’s basement by her late teens, it wasn’t until her senior year at Douglass College, almost finished with her B.A. in Sociology, that Snyder took an elective course in art that set her on the path to becoming an artist. “When I started painting it was as if I was speaking for the first time,” she said of this moment. “I knew I was doing what I had to do and that I would do it for the rest of my life.” She graduated from Douglass in 1962 and in the fall of 1963 enrolled in Rutgers University’s Master of Fine Arts program. At Rutgers Snyder began incorporating alternative materials into her work, responding to the dominance of Minimalism, and the female figure, reveling in its form without rendering it an object for male desire. Snyder completed her M.F.A. in 1966 and moved to New York the following year where she continued to push her practice in new directions, experimenting with symbolic abstractions and integrating a feminist dialogue into her paintings. 

Snyder began to gain public attention in the 1970s with a body of work she called her “stroke paintings.” Read as a response to Minimalism’s rejection of painterly qualities, she rendered paint strokes themselves, focusing on their sensory qualities while seeking to loosen the constraints of the grid as she both adhered to and transgressed from its structural qualities. These paintings were first seen in a group show at the Bykert Gallery in New York in 1971. That spring, her work was the subject of an Artforum feature by Marcia Tucker, “The Anatomy of a Stroke: Recent Paintings by Joan Snyder,” a time when writing on women artists was rare. In the fall, the stroke paintings went bicoastal: she showed at Michael Walls Gallery in San Francisco and at Paley and Lowe in New York. She was also included in several key museum exhibitions of the early 1970s, such as Grids (1972) at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; American Drawings, 1963–1973 (1973) at the Whitney Museum; and the Whitney Annuals in 1972 and 1973. Despite the work’s commercial success, Snyder soon shifted gears, feeling that people liked it for the wrong reasons: “No one (except Marica [Tucker]) has yet to mention my explorations and discoveries of space. My desire to go beyond into the stroke to turn the picture around w.o. [without] working with imagery but only the paint as the subject matter." There was also the simple fact of boredom: “I’d get bored if I did the same thing over and over … I did them. Everybody loved them, and I stopped doing them. They had become easy. They were Snyders. I had to move on.”

Parallel to this success was her growing involvement in the women’s movement. From 1971 to 1974 she helped to arrange exhibitions of women’s art and panel discussions with women artists at the Douglass College library, to great success. As she moved away from the stroke paintings, she further developed her feminist visual language, arguing for a specifically “female” esthetic: “our work comes out of our lives … women’s experiences are somehow different from men’s experiences, so our work is going to be different” (Snyder quoted by Herrera, p. 37). This is manifested as a rich and deeply personal lexicon of symbols that recur throughout her work, as well as the inclusion of writing, used when she has something to say that she feels can’t be said pictorially. Alongside this personal iconography, she also makes use of alternative materials like textiles and paper mache, fulfilling the feminist mission of breaking social and aesthetic hierarchies while reimagining the narrative capabilities of abstract art.