Sylvia Snowden: Painting Humanity

16 Mar-3 Nov 2024

Overview

This spring, The Hepworth Wakefield will open the first public gallery exhibition in Europe of African-American painter Sylvia Snowden’s work.

Snowden was born in 1942 in North Carolina and raised in Louisiana and Washington DC, before taking undergraduate and postgraduate studies in Fine Art at Howard University between 1960 and 1965. Snowden’s artistic training took place during a pivotal moment in Black American political history and the civil rights struggle, and she became deeply invested in these issues. Snowden describes her powerful figurative paintings as ‘portraits of humanity’.

Presenting a selection of work from a career that spans six decades, this exhibition will including large early paintings through to more recent works. Snowden works with oil paint and pastels as well as acrylic and collage to create her expressionist, distorted, monumental figures, capturing the psychological essence of her subjects – their triumphs, torments, joys and pains – in thick impasto.