Joan Snyder, 1994-1995

Joan Snyder

Maurice Sanchez, printer
1994-1995

Workshop: March 8-10, 1995

Joan Snyder received a BA from Douglas College and a MFA from Rutgers University. She was a leading exponent of the expressionist response to the reductive aesthetic of 1960s painting. In the 1970s Snyder was motivated by feminist politics that propelled her to challenge the myth of male artistic genius and to recast the canon of art history. Early in the decade, Snyder received positive criticism for her loosely brushed paintings, which were concerned with formalist issues. Yet, despite the praise, she soon began to look for a more expressive and personal approach to art. By 1974 her work included childlike drawings of stick figures, landscapes, and scrawled notes. Her canvases often included collage elements such as sewed, stuffed, or darned forms, a process the artist described as female in sensibility. Beginning in the mid-1980s in her field paintings, landscape resurfaced as a theme in her work. Equating her creative process with the ability to make a canvas field bloom, Snyder identifies the female body with the earth and fertility.

Snyder was invited to conduct a workshop with Maurice Sanchez to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Smith College Print Workshop. During this workshop, Snyder produced a series of monoprints, Study for A.C.T.A.S., which included a woodcut block and variant monotype inkings. She also created a series of painterly ink monotypes.

Joan Snyder. American, 1940 –