Sylvia Snowden (born 1942) is an African American abstract painter who works with acrylics, oil pastels, and mixed media to create textured works that convey the "feel of paint". Many museums have hosted her art in exhibits, while several have added her works to their permanent collections.

Early life and education

Sylvia Snowden was born in 1942 in Raleigh, NC. Snowden attended Howard University where she studied under David Driskell and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree and a Master of Fine Arts degree. She received a scholarship to Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine and has a certificate from Le Grande Chaumier in Paris, France.

Career

She has taught at Howard University, Cornell and Yale, has served as an artist-in-residence, a panelist, visiting artist, lecturer/instructor and curator in universities, galleries and art schools both in the United States and abroad.

Works

She has exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Women's Museum, Montclair Art Museum, Baltimore Museum of Art, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The Phillips Collection, Heckscher Museum of Art, American University, the Mary McLeod Bethune Memorial Museum and National Archives for Black Women's History, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri. Her works have been shown in Chile, the Netherlands, Ethiopia, Australia, the Bahamas, France, Mexico, Italy and Japan. Her 2000 exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art featured work inspired by the death of her son. She has received a number of awards including the Lois M. Jones Award for Recognition. The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art received grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation and from the National Endowment of the Arts to feature an exhibit on American abstract art called "Magnetic Fields" which included works by Sylvia Snowden and others. According to the museum, this exhibit marked the "first U.S. presentation dedicated exclusively to the formal and historical dialogue of abstraction by women artists of color." In 2023 her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

Selected exhibitions

• 2024 The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, UK