Joan Snyder

Joan Snyder (born April 16, 1940) is an American painter from New York. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, and an elected member of American Academy of Arts and Letters. Snyder first gained public attention in the early 1970s with her "stroke paintings," which used a grid to deconstruct and retell the story of abstract painting.

By the late seventies, Snyder had abandoned the formality of using a background grid. She began more explicitly incorporating symbols and text, as the paintings took on a more complex materiality. These early works were included in the 1973 and 1981 Whitney Biennials and the 1975 Corcoran Biennial.

Snyder's paintings are narratives of both personal and communal experiences. Through an individual approach and persistent experimentation with technique and materials, Snyder has extended the expressive potential of abstract painting.