Joan Snyder interview excerpt - painting

01/18/11 • 9 min

Oral History Collection from the Archives of American Art

In the course of a life, there is often one teacher who changes everything. For painter Joan Snyder, that teacher was Billy Pritchard. Snyder was on the path to becoming a social worker when she took an art elective with Pritchard in her senior year at Rutgers. In this excerpt from an oral history interview conducted in 2010 for the Archives of American Art and funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art, Snyder talks about her shift from social work to painting and renting her first studio in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1962.

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Dennis Oppenheim interview excerpt

Looking back on the 1950s, artist Dennis Oppenheim talks about Abstract Expressionism as a sort of "scientific pursuit" that was solitary and esoteric. It was pure fine art, created in a studio, as opposed to sculptors making public art in the real world. In this excerpt from an interview conducted in 2009 for the Archives of American Art, Oppenheim talks about the tensions between what he calls "pure studio art" and public art. This interview was funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art.

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