Gilda Snowden

Gilda, our Beloved impassioned brilliant artist 1954 – 2014 was trained at Wayne State University, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1977. On a Graduate Professional Scholarship, she completed her Master of Arts in 1978 and in 1979 her Master of Fine Arts. 

Since her first one-person exhibit in 1981, at Detroit’s Willis Gallery, to her event in 1988 at the city’s Broadway Gallery, where her tornado images swept the art community away.  Snowden had been indefatigably active in many art-related capacities.

Covering a 1988 show ARTnews said:  “She is a blood-and-guts urban artist whose work has a vibrancy and wholeness of spirit…  Her formal training is evident in every gesture.  There is strength; too, in the way Snowden pulls together widely disparate shapes, sizes and structures…Monument (an encaustic on wood construction in the show) has many levels of sensitivity, interest, and insight. This was more than enough to convince the Detroit Institute of Arts to acquire this piece. 

The Michigan Bell Telephone Company, Dayton Hudson Corporation, and Detroit collectors Dr. Margaret Betts, Dr. Dexter Fields and Dr. William F. Pickard, among others,  acquired her work.

As a curator of amazing vision, she was a major cultural force in bringing talented artists to the attention of a wider audience.  Her writing and  art criticisms are profound and eloquent without forsaking intelligibility. She taught art for 31 years and later served as the Professor of Fine Art at the Center for Creative Studies, College of Art and Design in Detroit, Michigan.