Biography

About Jenny

Jenny Snider earned her MFA in 1966 at the Yale School of Art and Architecture, where she studied the established canon, and trained as an Abstract Expressionist painter with Al Held and Jack Tworkov.

Snider came of age as an artist in the New York of the 1970’s. She was one of the early settlers of the area now known as Tribeca, and soon became involved with a circle of her peers-- Elizabeth Murray, Patsy Norvell, Louise Fishman, Joel Shaprio, -- and also with 2nd wave feminism, which she credits, among much else, with expanding her understanding of art to include the handmade arts of daily life: sewing, quilting, folk and outsider art. She finds her inspiration in personal memory, as well as in our shared cultural and historical memories. She makes narratives of these moments in many media, including painting, drawing, sculpture and animated film. Snider’s work is intimate and approachable; the essential quality of her art can be immediately seen and felt in the direct, spontaneous authenticity of her hand.

     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, she 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 New York and the United States. In October 2018, Snider had a one-person exhibition at the Edward Thorp Gallery in New York City. 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. She was represented by the John Davis Gallery in Hudson, NY from 2011 through its closing in December, 2019.