Joan Snyder

Joan Snyder was born in Highland Park, New Jersey in 1940 and received her bachelor's and master's degrees from Rutgers University's Douglass College. Snyder received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1974, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1983, and a Macarthur Fellowship in 2007. Her work is included in numerous public collections and was the subject of a 35-year retrospective at the Jewish Museum in New York in 2005. Snyder’s pioneering style in the 1970s infused emotional abstraction with imagery and text, an approach understood today as Neo-Expressionism. Snyder’s feminist impulse manifests in her images of the female body and references to ancient sources such as the Venus of Willendorf and the Hindu goddess, Kali.