Yaddo Alum Joan Snyder Returns To Deliver Skidmore’s Malloy Visiting Artist Lecture

SARATOGA SPRINGS. — Painter Joan Snyder, an artist known for experimentation with materials and technique, will deliver Skidmore’s Malloy Visiting Artist Lecture at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, March 18. Free and open to the public, the lecture will be in the Filene Recital Hall on the Skidmore College campus. The event marks a return to Saratoga Springs for Snyder, who was a guest artist at Yaddo, the Saratoga Springs artists’ retreat, in 2004. Snyder’s work was also featured in “The Jewel Thief,” a critically acclaimed multi-media exhibition at Skidmore’s Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery in 2010-2011. An abstract artist, Snyder is known for what Roberta Smith, writing in The New York Times, calls a “spirited, in-your-face, opulently textured, outrageously colorful style” developed over 40 years. Snyder herself says, “It’s an inner dialogue that often begins with some writing on tiny sketches while listening to music. These ideas for painting then appear on unbleached linen with many layers of paint and often other materials such a silk, burlap, dirt, dried flowers, berries, herbs, and glitter. Why, in the end, it all seems to work is a mystery, sometimes even to me.” The MacArthur Foundation, which selected Snyder for one of its fellowships in 2007, believes that Snyder’s work communicates universal messages. In its award announcement the foundation noted, “While her paintings mirror her personal experience, the visual messages she provides through her images convey universal and readily understood emotions…. Snyder has extended the expressive potential of abstract painting and inspired a generation of emerging artists.” Snyder’s work is included in many public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Phillips Collection, among others.