Sylvia 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’.
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, the technique where paint is laid on an area of the surface thickly.
Sylvia Snowden: Painting Humanity at The Hepworth Wakefield in 2024 was the first public gallery exhibition in Europe of Sylvia Snowden’s work. Presenting a selection of work from a career that spans six decades, Painting Humanity included large early paintings through to more recent works.
