Born April 16, 1940 in Highland Park, NJ, Joan Snyder received her AB from Douglass College in 1962 and her MFA from Rutgers University in 1966. Snyder has been the recipient of several awards including a MacArthur Fellowship in 2007, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1983 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1974.
Joan Snyder first gained public attention in the early 1970s with her gestural and elegant "stroke paintings", which used the grid to deconstruct and retell the story of abstract painting. By the late 70s Snyder, abandoning the formality of the grid, began to more explicitly incorporate symbols and text, as the paintings took on a more complex materiality. Often referred to as an autobiographical or confessional artist, her paintings are essentially narratives of both personal and communal experiences. Through a fiercely individual approach and persistent experimentation with technique and materials, Snyder has extended the expressive potential of abstract painting and inspired generations of emerging artists. Her early works were included in the 1973 and 1981 Whitney Biennials and the 1975 Corcoran Biennial.
Although Snyder’s paintings are often placed under various art-movement umbrellas—Abstract Expressionism, Neo-Expressionism, Feminist Art—the changing nature of her work, with its combination of personal iconography, female imagery, aggressive brushwork, and accomplished formalism, has kept her steadily untagged. Snyder lives in Brooklyn and Woodstock, New York.
