My Temple, My Totems was completed in January 1984, following the dissolution of the artist’s marriage to the photographer and filmmaker Larry Fink (b. 1941). The Museum’s canvas can be interpreted as the visual amalgam of pain related to Snyder’s painting Mourning/Oh, Morning of 1983 (Reeds Hill Foundation, Carlyle, Mass.), which the artist has described as an essay on her personal history of loss, including her failed marriage, an earlier abortion and miscarriage, and the separation from her Martins Creek farm in rural Pennsylvania, where she had lived with her husband and their daughter.⁵

In the Museum’s painting, a screaming head, painted in a jarring cacophony of colors, dominates the central portion of the canvas. Masks and anguished faces had begun to appear as part of the artist’s imagery in 1980, based on a small wood African sculpture the artist had acquired in the mid-1970s.⁶ As an expression of rage or as the manifestation of a “primal scream,”⁷ the tortured face in My Temple, My Totems wears the physical wounds Snyder has scratched into its mouth and eyes. The artist has also embedded and painted over gauze in the face and on other areas of the canvas, as though her injury can be neither bandaged nor cured. Small patches of purple velvet fleck the painting, and larger pieces of stiffened cloth and canvas are collaged on its surface.

The screaming face is barely contained within the simplified form of a yellow house, the almost childlike version of the pictograph that Snyder had adopted in many of her earlier paintings. Snyder has identified yellow as the color of anxiety,⁸ and her choice to use yellow for the house form, the “temple” referred to in the painting’s title, serves not only to silhouette the mask against the dark background of the painting but to signal her distress at the loss of her home. To the right and left of the central image, the artist has erected “sad totems.” At the lower-right corner a Y-shaped twig is embedded in paint fanning out in winglike strokes and spattering downward in tear shapes. Snyder considers this totem to be a crucifix, another symbol for loss. The small artificial grape positioned in the crook of the twig relates the Museum’s painting to two other works of the same period, Love’s Pale Grapes (1982, collection of the artist) and Love’s Deep Grapes (1983–84, collection of the artist). In these paintings full bunches of grapes were added to the canvas, suggesting an erotic ripeness and, in a Christian context, blood and sacrifice. In the earlier work, fruit burgeons from a vulvate opening in the canvas, while in Love’s Deep Grapes, of the same date as the Museum’s canvas, grapes are placed against a purple velvet backdrop accompanied by the text “there is a sadness in things apart from connected with human suffering.”

Other totems in the Museum’s painting consist of bare-branched tree forms constructed from wood and sticks applied to the canvas and covered with paint. Trees appear in many of Snyder’s paintings and first became a motif in 1978, following her miscarriage, when she also began to create totems that she considered to be symbols of the collective unconscious.⁹ Her landscapes of the 1980s include references to the apple trees of the old orchard at the Martins Creek farm, which remained as symbol of struggle and life after Snyder’s divorce, or the bean fields near her Eastport, Long Island home, where she later moved. The tree totems in the Museum’s painting are displayed on a black ground, which might otherwise connote a richly fertile soil or field but here suggests a barren or ruined landscape. At the upper right, a piece of worm-eaten wood from a dead tree or possibly a barn is a direct and nearly unedited statement of decay and loss.

Snyder’s work as it has evolved has both joined mainstream movements and departed from them. Positioned by her Stroke paintings within the modernist tradition, her media-rich, collaged canvases that succeeded them relocated her work with feminist imagery and ideologies of the 1970s, a characterization that has persisted through a second generation of feminist art. “Praised for its technical virtuosity [and] forgiven for its emotive content,” as Sarah Anne McNear puts it,¹⁰ Snyder’s work has remained personal, at the same time widening its scope to address more global concerns, such as children’s rights. Refusing to disguise joy, anger, or strong opinion, Snyder posits a female sensibility that she believes differentiates her work, as women’s lives diVer from men’s experience.¹¹ My Temple, My Totems is a painting the artist considers as unlike any she has created before or since, executed with a roughness she associates with later paintings in her career.¹² In this work, the tenor of grief, expressed in primitivizing, totemic signs, finds its equivalent in the intense physicality of media scraped, scratched, and sculpted onto the canvas. The artist resists identification as a tragic figure, however, regarding the act of painting and its outcome as an essentially optimistic pursuit.¹³

1. Snyder in Purchase 1978, p.8.
2. Purchase 1978, p.2, 20. Snyder’s early work at Douglass College, where she discovered painting, was reminiscent of German Expressionists whose work she had not yet seen. During graduate work at Rutgers, she created collage paintings made of kitchy materials. See Gill 1987, pp.129-35.
3. Waltham + 1994, p.15.
4. Purchase 1978, p.2.
5. Gill 1987, p.135.
6. Ibid,. pl. 135.
7. Allentown 1993-94, p. 17.
8. Conversation with the artist, Mar. 9, 1995 while she was creating monotypes at Smith College as part of the annual Print Workshop series. The comments that follow concerning totems in the Museum’s painting are from that conversation.
9. Gill 1987, p. 135
10. Allentown 1993-94, p.21.
11. Tarlow 1987, pp. 14-15, 22; se esp. p. 14
12. Conversation with the artist, see 8 above.
13. Tarlow 1987, p.22.