Biography

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.

Snyder has exhibited widely with early works included in the 1973 and 1981 Whitney Biennials and the 1975 Corcoran Biennial. In 2006, her work was the subject of a major solo and traveling exhibition Joan Snyder: A Painting Survey, 1969-2005 originating at The Jewish Museum, New York. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, most notably included in WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, MOCA, Los Angeles (2006-2008); Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age, curated by Achim Hochdörfer, Brandhorst Museum, Munich, and mumok, Vienna (2016); Art After Stonewall: 1969-1989, Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, New York (2019-2020); Out of Place: A Feminist Look at the Collection, Brooklyn Museum (2020); and Epic Abstraction: Pollock to Herrera, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2018-2020). Her solo exhibition Body & Soul is currently on view at Thaddaeus Ropac, London from Nov 28, 2024 to Feb 5, 2025.

Snyder is represented in numerous museum collections, including Art Institute of Chicago; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Harvard Art Museums; The Jewish Museum, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate Modern, London; and Whitney Museum of American Art.

Snyder is represented by Thaddaeus Ropac in Europe and Asia and in collaboration with CANADA in the US. She is also represented by Elena Zang Gallery in Woodstock, NY, and Anders Wahlstedt Fine Art in New York, NY. Snyder currently lives and works in Brooklyn and Woodstock, NY.