WASHINGTON, D.C. ARTIST Sylvia Snowden (b. 1942) is presenting her first solo institutional exhibition in Europe. “Sylvia Snowden: Painting Humanity” at The Hepworth Wakefield in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, UK, is a tight survey of 10 paintings dating from the 1970s to 2001. The earliest works were produced in the years following her foundational education. Snowden earned both a BFA and MFA from Howard University, where she studied with David C. Driskell. In the years between her degrees from the HBCU, she studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, France, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.
Sylvia Snowden, Painting Humanity, installation view, The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, 2024. Photo: Nick Singleton
Snowden paints with a sense of abandon. She is not afraid of engaging with the canvas. Thick with paint and rich with color, the result is incredibly powerful and moving. The abstracted figurative works on view are portraits. Each features a lone subject, such as iconic model Beverly Johnson or Julie Shepherd, a neighbor in the artist’s M Street neighborhood of Shaw in Washington. Snowden’s portraits are not meant to resemble her subjects, rather the amorphous and contorted forms explore their humanity and psychological state. Her dramatic gestures speak to a spectrum of emotions, from triumph and elation to sorrow and pain. “I’m painting how we as human beings maneuver through our lives,” Snowden said in the video below. “I make an effort at painting what we all feel as human beings, no matter what the race, that doesn’t matter about that, in my paintings. What matters is the fact that we are all human beings.” CT
