Sylvia Snowden’s ‘M Street’ Paintings Command Space at White Cube New York
Walk into “‘On the Verge,” Sylvia Snowden’s new show at White Cube, and the first thing you feel is that the paintings have been waiting for you—not patiently, not politely, but with the pent-up charge of someone about to tell you something you probably won’t want to hear. This is especially true of the “M Street” figures. The muscular, whiplashed bodies are feel carved out of paint that’s thick enough to bruise if you get too close. They lurch toward you in their reds and ochres as if the polite conventions and hyper-sexualized portraiture we see so often today were an affront to human experience. Snowden, now in her eighties, has gone big for her first solo outing with White Cube in the United States.
Stand next to one of these works—especially the Masonite-based canvases from the early decades—and you can feel the paint’s physical mass before you’ve sorted out the figure. The surfaces are not built up so much as engineered: oil pastel and acrylic clotted together into peaks and ridges, the whole surface vibrating with the residue of the artist’s hand. The way the pigment buckles and slides across the board has the warped energy of flesh under pressure; the figure is always present, but it’s never fixed. Things swirl and move. You’re not looking at a person so much as the record of a struggle to depict one.
The stand-out works come from Snowden’s “M Street” series, created between 1978 and 1997, and these make up the spine of the exhibition. The show was organized by Sukanya Rajaratnam White Cube’s global director of strategic market initiatives, who went through Snowden’s considerable archive of paintings in D.C. and then had each work carefully conserved and restored, a detail the gallery emphasizes because the work demands it. In several pieces, the impasto has regained its swagger, the surface once again alive with compression and release. And it matters, because Snowden’s figures aren’t symbolic or allegorical. They’re anatomical crises—bodies trying to contain whatever’s happening inside them.
Born in 1942 and trained at Howard University, Snowden absorbed the lessons of painters like Soutine and Kokoschka—a lineage she recognizes without treating it as a limit. She calls her approach “structural abstract expressionism.” For her, the figure is scaffolding; paint is the subject. The body gives her something to push against, a form sturdy enough to carry the emotional charge.
The M Street works emerged from Snowden’s life in Washington, D.C.’s Shaw neighborhood, where she has lived and worked since the late 1970s—a period marked by economic turbulence, inflation, rising unemployment, and the creeping displacement of low-income Black residents. All of that context matters, but Snowden refuses to literalize it. “The subject matter of my painting is the human being, period,” she has said. It’s a radical position: she neither neutralizes the social dimensions nor makes them a didactic frame. Her neighbors—friends, acquaintances, sometimes total strangers—become vehicles for sharper question: what does it mean to meet another person’s interior life head-on?
Snowden doesn’t reduce her subjects to tidy narratives or easy messages, and that’s what keeps the paintings from drifting into sentimentality or social-issue illustration. Look, for example, at Theresa Black (1997), a supine figure stretched across the Masonite like a body on a mortuary table. The dimensions recall a casket or an unfilled grave—the gallery points this out—but nothing about the work feels funereal. The reds flicker, the limbs twist, the surfaces churn. The figure seems caught between collapse and some stubborn instinct to stay alive, pinned by paint yet trying to push free.
The tension between containment and defiance runs through nearly every painting. In Untitled (Purple Hand) (2002), a later work that revisits the M Street subjects, a clawed, almost molten hand reaches forward as if the figure were trying to step out of the frame. Snowden has said, “They’re coming out to meet you, to greet you… they’re pushing out of those parameters.” It isn’t a metaphor. The paintings really do feel as if they could overtake the room.
This refusal to remain politely contained is a recurring motif, and it’s part of what makes encountering these works in person so destabilizing. Snowden doesn’t offer the safe, structural distance that much figurative painting builds in. Instead, she closes the gap between the viewer and the subject. Intimacy becomes the medium. That closeness is not always comfortable. Sometimes it feels like an ambush.
White Cube’s New York show builds on that view by expanding the frame. Alongside the earlier works are several of her early-2000s revisitations—the “Venus of M Street” paintings—in which Snowden returns to earlier subjects with a looser, more volatile hand. The surfaces are more undulating, the colors more restless, the bodies vibrating under the layered weight of paint and pastel. If the older works feel like humans in a pressure cooker the later ones behave more like seismic events, the figures are pushing not just against the edge of the painting, but against the paint itself. There’s more air in these works, but also more danger.
Still, the power of the exhibition lies in how convincingly it makes the case that Snowden’s project is ongoing. This isn’t a retroactive crowning or a market-corrective. It’s a demonstration of vitality. At a moment when much figurative painting feels either academically over-labored or anxiously decorative, Snowden’s work feels alive to something harder to quantify: the volatility of being human. There’s no style chase here, no gesture toward trend. Her language hasn’t been softened by market logic or institutional expectation. It remains what it always was—urgently, almost confrontationally direct.
The show also lands in a moment when museums, collectors, and galleries are rushing to ‘rediscover’ overlooked artists. That language is both true and insufficient. Snowden was overlooked by some institutions, yes, but she was also showing steadily—Baltimore in the ’60s and ’70s, Montclair in the ’90s, the Corcoran and the Phillips in the 2000s, a landmark presentation at the Rubell in 2022. The idea that she is suddenly being “found” is a market narrative, not an artistic one. What the new exhibition does is reframe her as a contemporary force rather than an archival correction.
On top of that, Snowden is a favorite of one of the art world’s most taste-making collectors, Beth DeWoody, who was turned on to her work by Franklin Parrasch in 2020. “Sylvia is a fine example of a hugely talented artist who is finally getting and gaining the recognition she so deserves,” DeWoody, who has “one large-and exceptional abstraction from 1987” in her collection, told ARTnews over email.
By the time visitors leave the gallery, the cumulative effect of the work has fully emerged. Snowden isn’t depicting people so much as the conditions under which people break, bind themselves back together, or refuse to go under. The paintings are not beautiful in the conventional sense; they’re too raw, too muscular, too alert for that. But they are deeply, almost defiantly alive. And that energy—the refusal to tidy up, to settle, to soothe—is what drives the show.
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