The Edward Thorp Gallery is pleased to announce this long overdue first solo exhibit in New York by the narrative artist Jenny Snider. Included will be both large and small-scale paintings, as well as drawings and sculpture, dating from the early 1970’s to the present.
After private studies with Jack Sonenberg and Phoebe Helman, Snider earned her MFA in 1966 at the Yale School of Art and Architecture, where she studied with Al Held and Jack Tworkov. After moving to New York she became involved with a circle of her peers, which included Elizabeth Murray, Patsy Norvell, Louise Fishman and Joel Shapiro.
The images in her works are drawn from personal experiences, as well as from our shared cultural and art historical influences constructing narratives in various media. Her works recall early American Modernism, artists who similarly sought to forge subjectivity (observation) and allusion into vital motifs. They also appear to draw on another important source: the allover qualities of Abstract Expressionism. Experienced together, the paintings conjure a vibrant and mythical realm of animated form and texture. They manifest an enthusiasm for historical precedents and their pictorial inventions.
Jenny Snider has been a lifelong student of art, literature, film, and history. Quoting from Theodore Dreiser, George Eliot, Sergei Eisenstein, among others. Snider’s works are playfully controlled environments; her art is experienced as being intimate, candid and authentic.
In 2014, she was the recipient of a Hassam, Speicher, Betts, and Symons Purchase Prize for her painting MONTAGE OF ATTRACTIONS and an Arts and Letters Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Snider spent a year as a Fellow in Visual Art in 2011-2012, at the American Academy in Rome. Other major awards include the 2006 President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, Queens College CUNY, and three residencies at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY. In the 1980’s and 1990’s, received two Fellowships each from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Working professionally for over five decades, she has exhibited widely in the United States. Her work is included in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Jewish Museum, the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, and in numerous private collections.