A MacArthur 'Genius' Wants Her Work Seen

As of today, painter Joan Snyder is a MacArthur Foundation anointed "genius," and there's just one modest request she has: Could the institutions that own her paintings please put them on display?

"At least two major museums in New York own my work, and it sits in the basement," she said, referring to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. "And now the Guggenheim has one, and I hope they hang it."

Ms. Snyder, though, is far from discontent. The MacArthur Foundation will announce today that she, along with 23 other artists, researchers, educators, and policy makers, is one of the newest recipients of its fellowship. Commonly dubbed the "genius grant," the award includes a cash gift of $500,000, distributed to winners over the course of five years; it is generally considered one of the most prestigious intellectual and creative honors. The leadership of the MacArthur Foundation is notoriously reticent to disclose nomination and selection criteria, but they cited Ms. Snyder's "fiercely individual approach and persistent experimentation with technique and materials."

Ms. Snyder, 67, while not a household name, has been a familiar face among the New York artistic elite for four decades. A product of the 1960s and '70s abstract painting movement, her evolving career — featuring work that has progressed from formal grid-based "stroke" paintings to layered creations incorporating text, found objects, and papier-mâché — has been more of a slow-burn than a flash in the pan. While her paintings may not enjoy prime real estate at MoMA, she has had a career retrospective at the Jewish Museum in 2005, a book published by Harry N. Abrams that same year, and more than 50 solo exhibitions. All of which are evidence of her longevity and productivity, if not her celebrity. "Snyder isn't a great artist," the New Republic magazine's art critic Jed Perl wrote in a review of "Abstraction in the Twentieth Century" at the Guggenheim in 1996, "but she's a formidable painter, and her best work holds perfectly in the imagination."

Still, the Park Slope resident has good reason to cherish the limelight that comes with a MacArthur grant, even at this advanced stage of her career. Not only might the award catapult Ms. Snyder out of the curious middle ground she has long occupied, but it may help shatter the glass ceiling she feels has capped her achievement. "There's definitely a glass ceiling that women hit in the art world," Ms. Snyder, whose cohorts include fellow female artists and MacArthur recipients Ida Applebroog and the late Elizabeth Murray, said. "It's not like we haven't made a lot of progress, but I just know that if I were a man, things would be different."

"I don't want to sound like sour grapes," she said, backtracking for a moment. "I am who I am because I'm a woman, and I've done the work that I've done, and I can't complain about that."

Indeed, much of the work for which Ms. Snyder is being celebrated — paintings such as "Heart-On," rife with feminist themes — resonates with the consequences of her decision to raise her child as a single mother. In 1980, she moved from a farm in Pennsylvania, where she had lived with her husband, to a loft on Mulberry Street. There, she raised her daughter, Molly, while painting in her adjacent studio. "Raising her on my own for a long time made a difference in my priorities," Ms. Snyder said. "I've never hung out or done anything because it would be a good career move. I go to openings. But in some ways I keep a kind of a low profile."

The MacArthur grant will likely raise that profile, but the artist has no plans to change the way she lives and works. In addition to the studio she now maintains behind her carriage house in Park Slope, Ms. Snyder works out of a small studio without plumbing in Woodstock, N.Y., where she strategically shrouds her works-in-progress so that the resident mice can't feed off of the seeds she sometimes incorporates in her paintings.

Still, though, the high-profile nature of the grant may help rectify what seems to be Ms. Snyder's pet peeve. A few days after discussing her award, Ms. Snyder called to clarify a statement she had made about her work. "The Whitney, too — they have one of my paintings, and they don't show it," she said on the phone from Woodstock. "I didn't want to leave them off the list."