Grit and Vitality, Daniel Sturgis on Joan Snyder at Blain Southern, London

In 1992 the American painter Joan Snyder published an article “Not Neo To Us” in The Journal of Rutgers University Libraries. The Douglass Library at Rutgers had been important to Snyder as she was an MFA student studying on the Douglass campus in the early 1960s. Having then left the college, she later returned in 1971 to work with Daisy Shenholm at the library. Together they set up the hugely influential Women Artists Series — an exhibition and discussion platform in the library’s lobby — which is, remarkably, still ongoing and was the first program of its kind in the US. It was a move that in the early 70s had real urgency: A way to counter the blatant bias against women artists and painters that Snyder saw in all US art departments at the time, as the faculties then were notoriously male-dominated. Snyder’s own professor at Rutgers was Robert Morris, but there was a lack of female role models. If women were teaching they appeared, as Snyder then did after she became better known, as a very occasional part-time sessional visitor.

Expanded review on the work and career of US painter Joan Snyder on the occasion of her solo exhibition in London at Blain Southern.