M Street, Sylvia Snowden (1978-1997) (EMPIRE LINES x White Cube Paris)

Contemporary artist Sylvia Snowden figures different approaches to expressionism, layering Western European and African American art histories, through their paintings of M Street, in Washington DC (1978-1997).

In 1962, the young artist Sylvia Snowden spent a summer in France on a student tour led by her teacher, the watercolourist Loïs Mailou Jones. They visited museums such as the Louvre, the Musée de l'Orangerie, and the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, where they likely first experienced the work of expressionist artist Chaïm Soutine. His gestural brushwork and use of impasto soon ‘saturated’ into her own treatment of paint, on her return to the United States. Today, Sylvia’s work is often ‘read’ in the context of abstract expressionism, placed in conversation with artists like Oskar Kokoschka, Karel Appel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Pablo Picasso. Though art historical references to such figures are present, they are never made directly, and are found deeper, in the thick layers of acrylic paint and oil pastel that build up their works. Perhaps, like the well-travelled Jones, Sylvia would prefer to be known as ‘an American painter with no labels’.

With her first exhibition in Paris, Sylvia shares how she has literally built up her practice over the past six decades, at times tending towards abstraction, and others, more figurative works. We talk about other 20th century migrants to the French city, including Beaufort Delaney and James Baldwin, both associated with the Harlem Renaissance, and Vincent van Gogh. Sylvia talks about the M Street series, named after the place in Washington DC where she has lived and worked since the late 1970s. Sylvia talks about the ‘turning’ of the predominantly African American neighbourhood, which experienced both ‘white flight’ and gentrification. She also details how her representations of men’s and women’s bodies speak to our universal, shared humanity, not individual forms.

Sylvia details how she started painting as a ‘social commentator’, and how she sees the choice of art as a ‘responsibility’. She talks about her time at Howard University, learning with artists such as Alex Katz, James A Porter, and David Driskell, the latter widely known for establishing African American Art as a field of study in its own right. Drawing on her own teaching, we discuss the distance between painting, and talking about painting, in art history and the media, as well as access to education for young Black students today, and her interest pluralising Western/European art histories of movements like impressionism and cubism. Challenging binary understandings of artistic practice, she describes the role of intuition in artistic production, a ‘combination of emotion and intellect’ or ‘thought and feeling’, that is often ignored in Western/European cultures. Seen for the first time on the gallery walls, Sylvia describes her triptych of her mother, a professor of English Literature who studied William Shakespeare in Stratford-Upon-Avon, sharing how her practice is also like writing - and the next chapter in her work.

Inside the White Cube: Sylvia Snowden runs at White Cube Paris until 16 November 2024.

For more about Sylvia Snowden, read about their exhibitions with Edel Assanti during Frieze London in 2022, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog-post-app/frieze-2022-retrospective

For more about Chaïm Soutine read about ‍Soutine: Kossoff at Hastings Contemporary, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog-post-app/a-perfect-match-chaim-soutine-meets-leon-kossoff

For more about Oskar Kokoschka, read about A Rebel from Vienna at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris, and Guggenheim Bilbao, in The Quietus: thequietus.com/culture/art/skar-kokoschka-a-rebel-from-vienna-guggenheim-bilbao-review/

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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