Sonya Rapoport

Sonya Rapoport

Sonya Rapoport 2005
Born Sonya Goldfarb
(1923-10-06)October 6, 1923
Boston, Massachusetts
Died June 1, 2015(2015-06-01) (aged 91)
Berkeley, California
Nationality American
Education Massachusetts College of Art, Columbia University, Boston University, University of California, Berkeley
Known for Conceptual Art, net.art, Feminism

Sonya Rapoport (1923 – 2015) was an American Conceptual and New Media artist. Originally trained as an Abstract Expressionist painter, in the 1960s Rapoport turned to challenging the domain of science by questioning its rigid conventions in performances and installations from a feminist perspective. She was a pioneer among artists using emerging computer technologies since the 1980s. 

Early life

Rapoport (née Goldberg) grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts. She regularly attended Saturday classes at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and spent summers at the art colony in Ogunquit, Maine.[1]

In 1941 Rapoport entered Massachusetts College of Art.  She met her future husband Henry Rapoport while he was a Ph.D. Candidate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  A year later, she transferred to Boston University to study Biology. In 1944 she married Henry Rapoport and the couple moved to New York, where Sonya Rapoport enrolled in New York University and, in 1946, received her B.A. in Labor Economics. She then attended the Art Students League of New York where she studied with Reginald Marsh. In September 1946 the couple moved to Washington, D.C., where Rapoport entered the Corcoran School of Art to study figurative art and oil painting.

In late September 1947, Henry Rapoport accepted a position as professor of organic chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. Sonya Rapoport studied at the UC Berkeley’s Art Department with Erle Loran and received an MA in Painting in 1949.

Artistic Career

Early Work

Rapoport’s early Abstract Expressionist paintings were the subject of a solo exhibition at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in 1963.[2] Following the show, Rapoport surprised her critics and mentors by abandoning the dominant Abstract Expressionist style of painting. In the new Fabric Paintings (1966-69) she challenged herself by purchasing pre-printed commercial fabrics and using them as her canvas. She experimented with appropriated materials, silkscreen and acrylic paint on inexpensive textiles. In a conversation with Peter Selz, as reported in his biography Sketches of a Life in Art,[3] Rapoport described this fabric as “funky”, a term that she and Selz then applied to a group of artists with similar interests, coining the term “funk art.”

Paintings and Works on Paper

In 1971 Rapoport discovered a series of antique geological survey charts in a desk she had purchased. Drawing and painting directly on these, she further developed her pictorial language of shapes to represent gendered symbols – a plastic housing was a uterus, a mandarin orange was a fetus, a cue holder was an udder, a fleur-de-lis was an infant, etc. As her interest in exploring the meaning of these symbols grew, she began copying elements from the survey charts, including the grid, numerical data, and written notation, into large scale, acrylic, airbrushed paintings. These works represent a critical transition to her interest in information, symbolic communication, and visual analysis.

Computer Printout Drawings

In early 1976 Rapoport chanced on a box of discarded computer printouts in the basement of the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department, a find which eventually lead to her reinvention as a digital artist. Printed in standard carbon-black dot matrix font on ruled, perforated, wide-format paper, these data sheets represent complex coded analyses of information. At this early stage, Rapoport did not have access to the meaning of the printouts. She used a limited palette of colored pencil and letter stencils to respond aesthetically to the printed data-sets and charts, resulting in dense, intricate abstract drawings. She soon began her collaboration with Professor of Anthropology Dorothy Washburn, creating drawings on printouts representing analysis of symmetry in Anasazi pottery design.

People Shapers (1978 - 2008)

Rapoport’s later computer drawings are the embodiment of a research-based practice in which she collaborated with many leading experts in the sciences and humanities. The long, linear nature of the computer printout paper facilitated her move towards an artmaking process involving the collection, synthesis, and presentation of information. These drawings include images, texts, and representations of data appropriated from primary sources, and explore current events, chemistry, art history, psychology, the history of science, and the role of women in society. Rapoport made use of reproduction technologies including stencils, solvent image transfers, and photocopies, and she used colored pencil to draw into the resulting densely layered imagery. Developed alongside her groundbreaking computer mediated interactive installations, many works turned her analytical eye on herself and her psychological constitution, exploring her personal history, her family, and domestic objects in her possession.

Chinese Connections (1982), artist book

Installations and Performances

Digital Mudra (1988 – 1989), detail of interactive installation.

Rapoport’s computer-assisted interactive installations of the early 1980’s are among the earliest artworks to use computers in gallery contexts. She collaborated with coders to create programs that gathered data about participants’ choices and used algorithms to analyze their personality. These works are startlingly prescient of our 21st century computer-mediated social life.

In projects such as Objects On My Dresser; Biorhtythm: The Computer Says I Feel, Digital Mudra; and Shoe Field, Rapoport used idiosyncratic and playful rubrics to create data portraits of her subjects. With the computer acting as a dispassionate intermediary, these projects allowed Rapoport to broach intimate topics with her audience including sexuality, psychological well-being, and beliefs about one’s personal attributes.

net.art

Rapoport was an early adopter of internet technology and was affiliated with a community of like-minded creators such as Judy Malloy, and others associated with MIT’s Leonardo journal. Beginning in 1989 she moved from using computers in gallery contexts to creating works of art that existed primarily online. Motivated by an interest in the humanistic potential of computers, these works were informed by her knowledge of programming and experience in creating work that responded to and incorporated participants’ choices. Reflecting Rapoport’s interest in the social construction of gender, race, and religion, imagery was sourced from a variety of sources, including art history, the sciences, newspapers, and her earlier works. The digitally collaged imagery and innovative hypertext interfaces that comprise these works exemplify early net.art aesthetics.

Legacy

Brutal Myths (1996), detail of net.art work

Rapoport participated in over fifty major exhibitions, including the 2006 Whitney Biennial, Violence without Bodies in 2005 at the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, the 2002 Bienal de Arte Art in Buenos Aires, and Documenta 8 in 1987 in Kassel, Germany. She was the subject of two late-career retrospective exhibitions (Kala Art Institute, 2011, and Mills College Art Museum, 2012) and the book Pairing of Polarities: The Life and Art of Sonya Rapoport, edited by Terri Cohn (Heyday, 2012).[4]

Sonya Rapoport Legacy Trust was established and endowed during Rapoport’s  lifetime to preserve her work and to broaden its critical and historical recognition. It supports the artist’s legacy through a variety of initiatives, including exhibitions, loans of artworks, research, publications, conservation, and educational programs for the public and the scholarly community. The trust maintains a collection of Rapoport’s artwork in a variety of media and encourages collaborative projects with artists, writers, and scientists in recognition of Rapoport’s unique methodology. It also encourages the study of the Sonya Rapoport Papers at the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.

Exhibition history

Solo Exhibitions
Selected Group Shows
Selected Lectures
Interactive Installations
Selected Solo Installations / Exhibitions
Selected Book-Arts Exhibitions
Painting and Drawing Exhibitions

References

  1. ↑ "Digitizing the Golem: From Earth to Outer Space", Leonardo Journal, Vol. 39, No. 2, (MIT, 2006),17.
  2. ↑ Dean Wallace, "Five One-Man Shows at Legion", San Francisco Chronicle, April 3, 1963
  3. ↑ Ann., Karlstrom, (2011). Peter Selz : Sketches of a Life in Art. University of California Press. ISBN 9780520269354. OCLC 778339820.
  4. ↑ Sonya., Rapoport,; Terri., Cohn,; Richard., Cándida Smith,; Roger., Malina, (2012). Pairing of polarities : the life and art of Sonya Rapoport. Heyday. ISBN 1597141879. OCLC 758973670.

Bibliography

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