SYLVIA SNOWDEN

White Cube is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in Paris by American artist Sylvia Snowden, whose expressionist painting practice is dedicated to the complexity of the human condition.

October 15 – November 16, 2024

This exhibition brings together 10 paintings from Snowden’s ‘M Street’ series, titled after a street in Washington, DC’s Shaw – a neighbourhood known for its African American history – where the artist has lived and worked since the late 1970s. Created between 1978 and 1997, each painting in ‘M Street’ captures a different person in the community, whether neighbours, friends or strangers, many of whom were unemployed or unhoused. In the 1970s and 1980s, America faced significant socio-economic turbulence which, as it so often does, disproportionately affected those living at society’s margins.

Marked by high inflation, rising unemployment and the eventual gentrification of the urban areas that appealed for their cheaper rent and services, the climate of the time spelled the displacement of many low-income residents. This period also saw continued racial tensions in the post-civil rights era and a burgeoning opioid epidemic, including widespread heroin use. It was against this backdrop that Snowden’s ‘M Street’ series emerged, a response in many ways to the systemic violence and complex realities lived by those in her immediate environment. 

While the ‘M Street’ paintings are rooted in the vernacular of everyday life in Shaw, they must also be read as Snowden’s psychologically freighted observations of a marginalised community, whose relevance transcends the place and time of their making. Overthrowing pictorial naturalism in favour of expressive, gestural means, Snowden’s work outstrips the limited resource of representation when it comes to the lived reality of an overlooked social milieu.

The frenetic energy deployed in her paintings gives form to a shared restlessness, one resultant of persisting social inequality and neglect. Though Snowden’s interests are foregrounded by a seminal series such as ‘M Street’, the power of her work is in its ability to transform the individual identitarian struggle into a synergistic and collective one – as the artist has remarked: ‘I paint the humanness of us all’.