Jenny Snider: Mutiny, rebellion, the experience of life

Jenny Snider, Noir, 1995, oil on canvas board, 20 x 24 inches

Contributed by Jason Andrew

Jenny Snider is a storyteller. The content and form of her art come from a variety of sources: history, popular culture, politics, and art itself in the form of grid-based abstraction representing natural and mechanical forms. But singularly, she is interested in “describing the experience of the life I know and imagine, all melding with the books I’ve read, the movies I’ve seen, the cars we drove, the views from my window.” A mini-survey of Snider’s work on view at Edward Thorp Gallery highlights the artist’s witty, gritty, and elusive career with selected works from the 1970s to the present.

Mutiny, rebellion, the downcast, and the outcast have been themes underlying Snider’s work. The earliest piece is from 1972 – a gridded ink drawing on rice paper titled Fuji. For Snider, much like her Yale classmate Jennifer Bartlett, the grid came to support an open construct. The recurrence of the grid for her is reflective of “conversations in consciousness raising groups, of being a woman and the struggle between domestic and professional.”

Snider cites personal experience in Master Class (1973), painted at a time when the artist was studying the 1887-1888 Shanghai Edition of The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, and when Picasso passed away. “Picasso died and there was a lengthy obit in The New York Times celebrating his big life,” Snider said. “I was so angry. His shadow cast over us all.” The beautifully rendered meditative studies she had been making gave way to an imposing bust portrait of one of the 20th century’s greatest misogynists. Beyond the portrait, and perhaps in an arch effort to outshine the master, Snider penned her own (hilarious) obituary that was later published in the satirical issue of Heresies edited by Martha Wilson.