Curated by Katherine French

For the last three and a half decades, Joan Snyder has fused process (whether desultory or earnest) with politics, and the resulting works, nearly thirty of which are on view for this survey at the Jewish Museum, have made Snyder a doyenne of feminist painting and an increasingly likely subject for art-historical canonization. Betraying the marks of their making, Snyder’s best works play the materiality of language against its signifying possibilities in gestures that are by turns surprisingly intimate and barbarously significant. Her graphic utterances—most recently against the war in Iraq—are often performative accusations, scrawled salvos that refuse to be just writing on the wall.

Travels to the Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, MA, Nov. 10, 2005–Feb. 5, 2006.

— Suzanne Hudson