The Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild is pleased to present a free slide lecture by MacArthur-award-winning artist and Woodstock resident Joan Snyder, Saturday, July 10, 3 pm at the Kleinert/James Arts Center in Woodstock. For the month of July, Snyder is the Master Artist in Residence at the Byrdcliffe Colony, courtesy of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. 

Joan 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.

Photo: Maggie Cammer

“Snyder is one of those artists who provide us with an eloquent model for working at our creative limits, which we can’t know, after all, until we try to reach them.” — Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times, 2007

Snyder has characterized the work of this period as follows: “The strokes in my paintings speak of my life and experiences. They bleed and cry and struggle to tell my story with marks and colors and lines and shapes. I speak of love and anguish, of fear and mostly of hope.”  

In 2005, The Jewish Museum in New York City presented a 35-year survey of her work that traveled. Last year, on the occasion of an exhibition of Snyder’s work, the Los Angeles Times wrote, “There’s a no-nonsense frugality to [Snyder’s] funky art, which is nothing if not serious. There’s also great pleasure, which comes with the wisdom of knowing what you can do and then doing more than that for reasons you can’t quite explain.”  

Joan Snyder holds a M.F.A. from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, and an A.B. from Douglass College, New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. Her work is in many public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, The New York City Jewish Museum, The Guggenheim, The High Museum of Art, and The Phillips Collection.