Joan Snyder at Betty Cuningham and Alexandre

Two simultaneous exhibitions--around a dozen recent paintings at Betty Cuningham ("Women Make Lists") and more than 50 works on paper at Alexandre--treated the art-viewing public to an update on the remarkable contribution of veteran painter Joan Snyder. Both showed the artist giving equal weight to her exultant assertion and deconstruction of color, brushstroke, line and language (constants over 35 years), and her impassioned articulation of social, political, environmental and personal concerns. Hallmarks of this pioneer feminist's art include her inimitable inventory of marks, strokes and drips; scrawled, diaristic writing; layering of pigment with collaged materials like fabric, seeds, herbs, glitter and plastic baubles; excavation, slashing, stuffing and sewing of the canvas; blurring of abstraction and representation; and an unabashed autobiographical orientation.

From the artist's statement in the paintings catalogue (there were publications for both shows), one learns that the new work is presided over by the spirit of an Iraqi woman holding her baby, an image from a newspaper that Snyder taped to her studio wall. In Antiquarum Lacrimae (The Tears of Ancient Women) and Mamilla Immortalis (The Breast That Never Stops Flowing), both 2004, Snyder invokes women throughout the ages in a protest against worldwide violence. The paintings' surfaces were covered first in loosely structured grids of strokes and drips, and then in Latin and English words that ooze down the canvas like the tears and breast milk cited in the titles. As in all of Snyder's work in which she uses texts, the words function as content, image and medium. Her newer palette comprises pastel greens, blues, yellows, pinks and purples, disrupted at intervals by her distinctive bulging, encrusted and dripping blood-red "wounds."

The drawing show included jewellike examples of Snyder's early investigations into form and language related to her "Stroke Paintings" of the early '70s; the taut, emotionally expansive My Lai Collage (1969) foreshadows her later humanitarian concerns. These were accompanied by recent drawings such as To Iraq: I'm So Sorry, The Tears of Women of Ancient Times and Women Make Lists (all 2004), in which the new pastel hues are used in classic Snyder compositions. They show her working through formal and personally expressive ideas, particularly as they relate to the paintings. In Women Make Lists, for example, she hand-wrote lists of people's names over circles delicately rendered in pencil and watercolor. In the corresponding painting, these were reinterpreted as splattered orbs of thick pigment, papier mache, acrylic and herbs, together with fabric pockets filled with glass beads. Themes of life and death, of the everyday and the epic, of timelessness and humanity have continued to prevail in Snyder's masterful, expressive works.

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