Dancing with the Dark: Prints by Joan Snyder 1963-2010

Dancing with the Dark: Prints by Joan Snyder 1963-2010, the first retrospective of the artist’s prints, displays the extraordinary range of Joan Snyder’s distinctive graphic achievement. A Rutgers alumna, nationally noted painter, and 2007 MacArthur Fellow, Snyder has developed a powerful body of work that explores aspects of nature, humanity, and identity. A pioneering feminist artist who was championed early in her career, Snyder has infused her works with physical energy and vibrant color to express deeply personal experiences. For over 45 years, she has created remarkable prints full of passion and zeal, in addition to her widely acclaimed paintings; over 110 prints are featured in this exhibition. Her adventurous, if unorthodox, approach to printmaking challenges traditional uses of graphic media. Snyder restlessly combines different print techniques, then varies them with painterly applications of color ranging from melancholy darks to sensuous hues to shocking accents. The visual eloquence and vigorously applied techniques in the resulting prints, which are full of confessional and memorializing iconography, invite engagement with their raw emotional power.

This major exhibition presents rare uneditioned prints, unique hand-colored monoprints, and outstanding examples of editioned prints with selected variant impressions or working proofs. The exhibition ranges from Snyder’s earliest woodcut portraits, executed during her student years, to “hot off the press” prints. Many of the images and variant proof impressions are borrowed from the artist; other works are from the Zimmerli Art Museum’s collection or other museums and private holdings.

This exhibition is accompanied by the first illustrated monograph documenting Joan Snyder’s prints, with essays by Faye Hirsch, the noted contemporary arts writer and senior editor at Art in America, and Marilyn Symmes, the exhibition’s organizing curator and the Zimmerli’s Director of the Morse Research Center for Graphic Arts and Curator of Prints and Drawings.