Sylvia Snowden's monumental expressionistic paintings hit you in the gut. Bodies arch, hunch and contort, emanating suffering, fear, joy and aspiration. But what really holds your gaze, even more than their misshapen, hyperextended forms painted in gorgeous hues, is their fierce vitality.
At the age of 81, the American artist is having her first major solo show in the UK. The title, M Street on White, takes its name from the road in inner-city Washington DC where Snowden has lived for the past 45 years. Although individually titled after M Street's residents, the paintings are emphatically not portraits, she insists. "I'm making an effort to show the emotional state," Snowden says when we meet at Edel Assanti gallery in London. "Because we're human beings, we all have the same sort of tugs and pushes through life, no matter what the background is, and that's what I'm painting about."
The artist worked on her M Street series for a decade, starting in 1978, the year she moved into the Shaw neighbourhood which has since become gentrified. All her neighbours bar one were African American, mainly living in rooming houses. She didn't socialise with them, but their children came over to play with her kids. In naming the paintings after the residents, there is a sense of commemoration, although she is strongly resistant to attempts to draw narrative connections between her subjects' biographies and the figures she depicts. The thinking, says Snowden, goes along the lines of: "I live in a certain part of town and I'm Black, therefore these are people who are downtrodden. That's the frame in particular that white people have, and it has nothing to do with this. I'm painting about the rich white people too. I'm painting about humanity."
Any viewer might see themselves in the stooped vertical figure portrayed in rusts and cool minty blues in the painting Alice Shannon, or in the horizontal form starkly foregrounded against white in Beverly Johnson, whose sinewy limbs are depicted in a frenzy of vigorous orange and red brushstrokes and bold yellow zigzags. These bowed and cramped figures, which have the psychological intensity of expressionist painters Snowden admires such as Chaïm Soutine and Karel Appel, appear to be straining to break out of the frame. "Exactly," she says. "They want to break out of their confinement. And we do too as humans, in everything that we do."
Over her six-decade career, Snowden has earned accolades for shows in the United States and taught at Howard, Yale and Cornell Universities yet she hasn't enjoyed the level of international recognition of some of her American peers. I wonder whether it's been hard to get her work seen as an African American female painter? "Twice as hard," she replies, without a moment's hesitation.
Many of the paintings have never been exhibited before, for instance. "I don't have that go get 'em personality," she says. But Snowden is gaining notice in the UK. This show comes on the heels of her inclusion earlier this year in the group exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-70 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and last year's acquisition of one of her paintings by the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. She's sceptical, though, about the recent surge of interest in Black artists' work. "White people go through spurts and they'll show some Black art," she says. "Then it wears off."
Sylvia Snowden: M Street on White, installation view, Edel Assanti, London, 2023. Copyright the artist. Courtesy Edel Assanti. Photo: Andy Keate.
Born in 1942 in Raleigh, North Carolina, to parents who were both educators, Snowden was supported from the outset in her desire to pursue art. (They gave her a set of watercolour paints when she was four.) She studied fine art at Howard University, a hub of Black intellectualism, during the 1960s when the civil rights movement was in full swing. It was a time when African American leaders were calling on artists to represent the struggle in their work; abstraction was seen as apolitical, an indulgence that did not serve the cause. "We were defining what Black art was, what did it look like? And it was representational. It was not abstract," Snowden says.
Some of her paintings from that period feel more political, notably her 1974 Betty series, portraying a flame-haired white woman she knew who preyed on Black men. "See, white people say that Black men are well endowed and that has given white men an inferiority complex," Snowden says. "That has fed the curiosity of white women. That's what that series was about and about how Black men are raped in that way."
By the late 1970s, when she moved into M Street, Snowden was more concerned with the universal than with specific individuals or issues of gender, race or class. Executed in acrylic and oil pastel on masonite, these paintings all feature figures with monstrous claw hands that seem to have a life of their own, weighing down extended arms or reaching out to hold. "That's because we use our hands to express ourselves faster than we use our mouths," says Snowden, who is wary of words, "those symbols that are somebody else's". Feet, too, are huge and clod-like, reminding us of our rootedness to the earth.
The artist oscillates between abstraction and figuration in her practice, painting on the floor so she doesn't have to battle gravity when applying the pigment. She paints every day, creating works that have become increasingly sculptural in their use of impasto. "I enjoy the feel of paint. It excites me to take it and put it on to the canvas," she says.
Snowden has developed her own distinctive style, fusing African American experience with western modernism. She doesn't like to analyse her paintings or the feelings that inspired them; to her mind they are simply attempts to capture something of the human spirit. She points to a canvas encrusted with luscious electric blue whorls overlaid with delicate orange markings. "I am in that, along with you," she notes. "That's what I'm hoping for. That's what I'm striving for."
