Joan Snyder (b. 1940) boasts an illustrious career spanning over five decades, during which she has continually evolved her unique language within painting. For Snyder, Abstract Expressionism acted as a catalyst for the creation of her intense, personal, and complex works. Her deep exploration of abstraction is driven by her feminist perspective, which forged new pathways in contemporary American painting. Snyder was born in Highland Park, New Jersey and earned her AB from Douglass College her MFA from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Her journey began in the late 1960s and early 1970s with her Stroke paintings, which were featured in the 1972 Whitney Annual, the 1973 Whitney Biennial, and the 1975 Corcoran Biennial. These works stood in stark contrast to the predominantly male Minimalist movement of the period and established her career, renowned for its uniquely personal style. In 2005, the Jewish Museum in New York City hosted a thirty-five-year retrospective of her work, which traveled to the Danforth Museum in Framingham, Massachusetts.

Snyder’s works are housed in the collections of prestigious institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and Tate Modern in London. Her most recent museum exhibitions include solo shows at the Allentown Art Museum, Rose Art Museum, The Parrish Art Museum, and The Brooklyn Museum of Art.