Joan Snyder

Joan Snyder is a groundbreaking visual artist, celebrated for her vibrant paintings and her leading role in feminist art. Her award-winning work is represented in many prominent public collections nationwide, and she is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (2007), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1983), and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1974). Snyder’s prolific career spans generations, and she consistently remains a highly regarded painter and significant figure in the visual-arts realm.

Snyder’s introduction into the New York art world began with a series of “stroke” paintings completed in the 1970s. 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. Although Snyder’s paintings are often placed under various art-movement umbrellas — abstract expressionism, neo-expressionism, and feminist art — the changing nature of her work, with its combination of personal iconography, female imagery, aggressive brushstroke, and accomplished formalism, has kept her steadily untagged.

Her work is represented in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Jewish Museum, and the Guggenheim in New York City; the High Museum of Art in Atlanta; the Phillips Collection and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.; and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In 2005, the Jewish Museum presented a 35-year survey of her work, which then traveled to the Danforth Museum in Framingham, Massachusetts. In conjunction with the exhibition, Abrams Books published a monograph, Joan Snyder, which includes an introduction by Norman Kleeblatt and essays by Hayden Herrera and Jenni Sorkin.

Rutgers’ own Zimmerli Art Museum is hosting the traveling retrospective, “Dancing With the Dark: Joan Snyder Prints, 1963-2010,” from January 29 through May 29, 2011, which includes a meeting with the artist on March 1. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Faye Hirsch and Marilyn Symmes, co-published by DelMonico Books/Prestel and Zimmerli Art Museum.

A native of Highland Park, New Jersey, Snyder received a bachelor of arts from Douglass College in 1962 and a master of fine arts in 1966 from Mason Gross School of the Arts. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn and Woodstock, New York.