Joan Snyder

Joan Snyder’s interest in art began when she was a junior in college and took her first introductory painting course. The experience made her realize that through art she had found a way “to talk about my feelings, a way to speak- and that was the beginning.” Snyder received her A.B. from Douglass College and her M.F.A. from Rutgers and since then has been producing work as both a painter and a printer. Her work draws from her own personal feelings, German expression, children’s artwork, and female imagery and materials. She is most known for being part of the beginning of the early feminist movement, but she considers herself both a feminist and an artist, as opposed to someone making feminist art. “Making art is, for me, practicing a religion…creates for me a heritage. It is a place to struggle freely at my altar. I want my work to be strong, available, generous. I need it to be joyous and sorrowful, complex and meditative, all at once. To be vulnerable, to have a feeling of transcendence and in this state to give meaning.”

Smith, Beryl, Joan Arbeiter, and Sally Shearer Swenson. Lives and Works: Talks with Women Artists. 2. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press Inc., 1996. 181-190. Print