Betty Cuningham Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent paintings by Joan Snyder. The exhibition, A Year in the Painting Life, is comprised of approximately 15 paintings. This will be the artist’s third show in the space; she will be present for an opening reception on September 16. An illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition.

Snyder, a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, has been showing in New York since the early 1970’s. She has said that when she started to paint, it was as if she “spoke for the first time – and really spoke, and was able to say what [she] wanted to say.” As such Snyder’s paintings are full sentences: often sectioned off like pages in a book, denoting the life cycle of a tree, the moon or fields of flowers and sometimes speaking to personal or political concerns, whether they are feminist issues, anti-war sentiment, or a memorial for a personal loss.

This exhibition focuses on paintings reminiscent of Snyder’s early stroke paintings of the 1970’s and field paintings of the 1980’s. In her newest paintings Snyder continues to use a variety of media. In Oh April, a triptych and the largest painting in the show, Snyder uses (in addition to oil and acrylic on linen) burlap, fabric, pastel, dirt, herbs and seeds. In Ode to B, a memorial to a close friend, red strokes, some appearing to be hearts, drip to the base of the painting, and small ghost-like sail boats traverse the impastoed white surface.

In 2011, the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University will open Dancing with the Dark: Prints by Joan Snyder 1963 – 2010, a comprehensive retrospective of Snyder’s prints on view January 29 – May 29, 2011. It will be accompanied by a fully illustrated monograph. In 2005-6, The Jewish Museum in New York, NY organized the exhibition Joan Snyder: A Painting Survey, 1969-2005, which traveled to the Danforth Museum of Art in Framingham, MA.

Snyder’s work can be seen in numerous public collections, including: the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; The Jewish Museum, New York, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

Joan Snyder was born in Highland Park, NJ in 1940. She received an AB from Douglass College in 1962 and a MFA from Rutgers University in 1966. She lives and works in Brooklyn and Woodstock, NY. Throughout her career, Snyder has received a host of prestigious awards and honors. Most recently, in 2007, as mentioned above, she was honored as a recipient of The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.