NEW YORK, NY.-The Jewish Museum will present Joan Snyder: A Painting Survey, 1969-2005 through October 23, 2005. The exhibition will include over 30 of Snyder�s major works in the most comprehensive museum survey of the artist�s paintings to date. Paintings on view will range from monumental (some as large as six by twelve feet) to modest in scale. They take the viewer by surprise as the artist skillfully invests the large canvases with an intensely personal sensibility and the smaller ones with astonishing grandeur. This mid-career review has been organized by the Danforth Museum of Art in Framingham, Massachusetts where it will be on view from November 10, 2005 through February 5, 2006.

Joan Snyder is a painter who embraces the formal qualities of abstraction while imbuing her work with narrative content that is often deeply personal and politically motivated. In her canvases she combines rich color, dramatic brushwork, and the sensuous application of a wide range of materials and colors such as velvet, silk, papier-m�ch�, straw, and plastic.

Snyder is an avowed feminist. The initial reception of her work in the 1970s was closely tied to the early feminist art movement. Her paintings also communicate her sensibilities in regard to loss, family, childbirth, the environment, spirituality, and her Jewish heritage.

Snyder�s painting resists easy categorization. She has been referred to as an expressionist, neoexpressionist, and lyrical abstractionist. Her work first appeared after the popular acceptance of Pop Art and Minimalism, and her highly personal, gestural expression is as much a reaction to the heroic universal stance of Abstract Expressionism as it is a cogent precursor to the playful extravagance of Neo-Expressionism. But for the artist, whatever the stylistic category a particular work is assigned, her art serves a vitally important function. Snyder seeks to communicate deeply held beliefs through her paintings. �For me,� she has said, �when I started to paint, it was like speaking for the first time. I mean, I felt like my whole life, I had never spoken. I had never been heard. I had never said anything that had any meaning. When I started painting it was like I was speaking for the first time. And that�s how important painting is to me.�

Joan Snyder first achieved recognition in the 1970s, with her �stroke� paintings, simple abstract renderings in which horizontal gestures are applied to the canvas in grid-like notations with a paint-laden brush. �I knew while I was doing it,� she has commented, �that I had made a breakthrough.� These paintings appeared in the Whitney Museum�s 1973 Biennial and the Corcoran Gallery�s 1975 Biennial. Dozens of solo shows followed. Eventually, Snyder felt the need to move beyond these grid-based abstractions to create works that were at once more complex and personally resonant. She developed a visual language that allows her to incorporate a multitude of forms, symbols, and text in her paintings. The collective unconscious and the universality of archetypes, as defined by Carl Gustav Jung, are essential to her imagery.

Early works such as Squares (1972) demonstrate Snyder�s expressive examinations, revealing the artist�s structural reliance on the grid and her gestural resistance to it. Subsequent paintings such as Women in Camps (1988) and Study for Morning Requiem with Kaddish (1987-88, in The Jewish Museum�s collection), attest to Snyder�s political engagement, while Moonfield (1986) and Ode to the Pumpkin Field (1986) reveal a feeling of physical and spiritual kinship in nature. Many of the paintings from the 1990s are requiems for the deceased. The devastating losses from AIDS prompted Journey of the Souls (1993). As she was driving to visit her dying father, she saw a fruit tree in a yard, and this vision inspired The Cherry Tree (1993). Words and inscriptions are an integral part of Snyder�s narrative impulse. The text incorporated into the painting She is the Earth (2000), quoted from James Joyce, creates a sense of movement across the canvas.

Born in Highland Park, New Jersey in 1940, Snyder was the middle child of Jewish parents who never lost a sense of their immigrant heritage. She grew up in a community intent on assimilation in the anxious years following World War II. Her maternal grandmother was an Orthodox Jew and Snyder has lamented the loss of that cultural influence: �All that is gone with her now. There is no place to go back to for second-generation Americans.� Snyder entered Douglass College in New Brunswick, New Jersey to study sociology, intending to become a social worker. Her life changed when she took an art class during senior year. In the graduate painting program at Rutgers University, Snyder was particularly inspired by early 20th century Expressionism: �I remember looking at Vlaminck, Jawlensky, Nolde, Kandinsky, and Klee.� Moving to New York in 1967, she first gained attention for her work in 1971. Art critics, at the time, commented chauvinistically on the novelty of such bold works coming from a women artist.

Snyder now lives and works in Brooklyn and Woodstock, New York. Over a forty-year career, she has explored formal abstraction while allowing her work to be a barometer of her emotional life. Snyder has expressed social concerns, embraced the forces of nature, and explored death and loss. Through all this, she has pursued a style of painting that is, to use her word, �symphonic� in its inclusiveness and emotional range. In the artist�s view, her paintings often have a rhythm similar to the incantations found in requiems and cantatas � music she finds inspiring. And sometimes she seeks the cadence of Jewish prayers like the Kaddish that she heard while attending services as a child.

Joan Snyder: A Painting Survey, 1969-2005 has been organized by Katherine French, Director of the Danforth Museum of Art in Framingham, Massachusetts. Gabriel de Guzman, Curatorial Program Associate, has coordinated the exhibition for The Jewish Museum in consultation with Norman L. Kleeblatt, Chief Curator.

Joan Snyder, the first major book on this influential artist, by Hayden Herrera with an essay by Jenni Sorkin and an introduction by Norman L. Kleeblatt, will be published in the fall of 2005 by Harry S. Abrams, Inc. Illustrated with 140 images, the 180-page hardcover book will be available for $50.00 at The Jewish Museum�s Cooper Shop and bookstores nationwide.