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. Suspended indeterminately in their compositions, and devoid of any identifying markers, Snowden’s paintings are peopled by figures that exceed their physical form and, yet, remain confined by the bounds of the frame.

These paintings are not, as art critic Alice Thorson noted in her profile of the artist in 1988, portraits per se, but rather ‘tributes to the human spirit – its strength in adversity, its kindness and despair’. Though each is instigated by, and titled after, a specific individual, the ‘M Street’ paintings move beyond subject-led investigation, and demonstrate an equal investment in the painterly exercise and formal experimentation. Snowden’s impasto, which is at times so thick it becomes almost sculptural, and her choice to use unforgiving Masonite board as a support, materially convey the hardness and brutality faced by the Shaw community. Rendered twisted and contorted, the body of Ethel Moyd (1984), for example, pushes insistently against imprisonment by the picture plane. This two-way movement, of imposition and resistance, speaks to both the problem of representation in painting and the ambivalence of the ‘M Street’ locals. Others, such as Miss Leslie Mae (1982) and Paula Black (1984), are conveyed by a mass of flailing limbs and oversized, claw-like hands. As Snowden herself has remarked, ‘my figures do extend themselves to the perimeters of the canvas or paper – they’re coming out to meet you, to greet you. The point is, they’re pushing out of those parameters. But they’re not tortured […] I’m trying to get into the whole guts of a person; I paint the person without the packaging.’

Snowden moved to Washington, DC, in 1956 at the age of 14 with her parents, who were supportive of her creative practice and encouraged her to enrol at Howard University. There, she studied under artists such as James A Porter, Lois Mailou Jones and David Driskell, with the latter widely known for his commitment to establishing African American Art as a field of study in its own right. In 1962 Snowden spent the summer in France on a student tour led by Jones, where she visited museums such as the Louvre and the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris. It was likely here that she first experienced the work of Expressionist artist Chaïm Soutine, whose gestural brushwork and use of impasto had a profound impact on her own treatment of paint. Soutine’s influence is, perhaps, most pronounced in Snowden’s use of distortion and exaggeration as a way of eliciting emotionally charged states such as despair, joy, suffering. Although drawn, for similar reasons, to the paintings of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Oskar Kokoschka, Snowden understands her own work as a ‘structural’ species of abstract expressionism: ‘it’s based on the structure of a human, but the figure isn’t necessarily the subject matter. The figures become paint.’ 

The triptych Jessie B. Snowden, I, II, II (1978–82) is a depiction of the artist’s mother, who worked as a professor of English Literature. Snowden’s facility with the medium of oil pastel comes to the fore in this particular work, which sees animated passages of brown, blue, yellow and green jostling within thick outlines of black acrylic. The nebulous scrawls of pastel evoke the subject’s corporeality as much as her personhood, recalling organs, nerves and molecular constellations. In each iteration, Jessie B. Snowden appears to be seated, with legs splayed and head cocked to the side, surrounded by lush expanses of sage green. To the far right of the triptych’s third panel, a lick of red flame creeps up its side, suggesting the presence of a roiling passion or imminent destruction. The vibrant, varied palette in this triptych could also be read as an homage to Snowden’s mother, who reportedly created a home ‘with the use of strong colour’. 

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’.