Sylvia Snowden “Shell, Glimpses”

Franklin Parrasch Gallery

This event has ended.

Franklin Parrasch Gallery presents Sylvia Snowden: Shell, Glimpses, the gallery’s second solo exhibition in the New York space with the Washington, D.C.-based artist. The thirteen paintings on paper that comprise this show, all created in 2003, have been stored privately in the artist’s studio and are now being exhibited publicly for the first time.

Sylvia Snowden (b. 1942, Raleigh, NC) has spent most of her sixty-plus year career focused on addressing the human experience – the vast range of conditions and transformational states that express the human spirit and its relationship to survival. “We are all going back to the earth,” Snowden has noted, referencing the process of experiencing life - its joys, its challenges, its frailties, its tragedies, and its inevitable channel back to the earth. This is the thematic root from which all of Snowden’s passionately executed images emerge.

Snowden’s “Shell, Glimpses” series is a focused observation of a life – that of her daughter Shell. The context here is of the most intimate and committed nature: a mother devoting herself to her daughter as subject. It is in this series that Snowden’s deepest and most personal observations of the human figure are deftly and abundantly articulated. Snowden’s focus is on the joy and celebration of the mother-daughter bond. Each image crystallizes a moment of understanding and connection between the two at different phases of their lives.

The paintings in this show embody the artist’s decades-long pursuit to describe and express the humanity and interior nature of her subjects. Painted on heavy stock Bainbridge watercolor paper, the expressive, buoyant, impasto figures in “Shell, Glimpses” – up to 1 ½ inches thick – are physically sculptural and gesturally audacious. As she renders her daughter in this series, Snowden continues to push for deeper engagement with complex chroma and volume, resulting in evocative, engaging, and empathetic imagery.

Installation view: Sylvia Snowden: Shell, Glimpses

Sylvia Snowden was born in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1942, and spent her childhood in New Orleans, Louisiana. At the age of 14, she and her family moved to Washington, D.C.. Snowden studied in the art department at Howard University (Washington, D.C.) under James Porter, Lois Mailou Jones, James Wells, and David C. Driskell, receiving her B.A. in 1963 and her M.A. in 1965. Snowden has a certificate from Académie de la Grande Chaumière (Paris, France, 1963), and received a scholarship at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Skowhegan, ME, 1964). On the recommendation of her close friend and mentor E.T.C. White, Snowden went to Australia for a year-long residency in 1975. Snowden has taught at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY), Howard University (Washington, D.C.) and Yale University (New Haven, CT). In 2023 Snowden’s work was featured in Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-70, Whitechapel Gallery (London, UK) and Fondation Vincent van Gogh (Arles, France). In 2022, Snowden’s show Shell; Glimpses was the featured inaugural solo exhibition at Rubell Museum DC (Washington, D.C.). In 2018, Snowden’s work was featured in the landmark exhibition Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960-Today at the National Museum for Women in the Arts (Washington, D.C.). Snowden has also exhibited at the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.); The Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.); Montclair Art Museum (Montclair, NJ); Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore, MD); Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY); The Phillips Collection (Washington, D.C.); The Heckscher Museum of Art (Huntington, NY); and the National Archives for Black Women’s History (NABWH) of the Mary McLeod Bethune Council House National Historic Site (MAMC), (Washington, D.C.). In 2021 Snowden was awarded the first edition of the Spirit Now London Acquisition Prize. Snowden’s works are held in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), Rubell Museum (Washington, D.C. / Miami, FL), Fitzwilliam Museum at University of Cambridge (Cambridge, UK), and the Rachofsky Collection (Dallas, TX), among others. Her works have been shown globally in Chile, the Netherlands, Ethiopia, Australia, the Bahamas, France, Mexico, Italy, and Japan. Sylvia Snowden is represented by Franklin Parrasch Gallery.