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.