Sonya Rapoport (October 6, 1923 – June 1, 2015) was an American conceptual, feminist, and

New media New media describes communication technologies that enable or enhance interaction between users as well as interaction between users and content. In the middle of the 1990s, the phrase "new media" became widely used as part of a sales pitch for ...

artist. She began her career as a painter, and later became best known for computer-mediated interactive installations and participatory web-based artworks.

Early life

Sonya (née Goldberg) was born on October 6, 1923 in Boston, Massachusetts and grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts. There, she regularly attended Saturday classes at the

Boston Museum of Fine Arts The Museum of Fine Arts (often abbreviated as MFA Boston or MFA) is an art museum in Boston, Massachusetts. It is the 20th-largest art museum in the world, measured by public gallery area. It contains 8,161 paintings and more than 450,000 works ...

where she studied with

Karl Zerbe Karl Zerbe (September 16, 1903 – November 24, 1972) was a German-born American painter and educator. Biography Karl Zerbe was born on September 16, 1903 in Berlin, Germany. The family lived in Paris, France from 1904–1914, where his fat ...

. She spent her childhood summers at the

art colony An art colony, also known as an artists' colony, can be defined two ways. Its most liberal description refers to the organic congregation of artists in towns, villages and rural areas, often drawn by areas of natural beauty, the prior existence o ...

Ogunquit, Maine Ogunquit ( ) is a resort town in York County, Maine. As of the 2020 census, its population was 1,577. Ogunquit is part of the Portland– South Portland–Biddeford, Maine Metropolitan Statistical Area. History Ogunquit, which means "be ...

Education

Rapoport studied biology at Boston University and economics at New York University, graduating with a B.A. in 1946. In 1944, she married Henry Rapoport, a chemistry professor, and went with him to New York, Washington, DC, and then to Berkeley, CA. Sonya Rapoport pursued her studies in art throughout their moves. She attended the Art Students League of New York where she studied with Reginald Marsh (artist), Reginald Marsh, then entered the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, Corcoran School of Art and Design to study figurative art and oil painting, and finally enrolled in the graduate program in Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied with Erle Loran, receiving her M.A. in 1949. The Berkeley art practice curriculum at that time was heavily influenced by the aesthetic philosophy of Hans Hofmann, although the school produced artists as divergent in their practices as Rapoport, Jay DeFeo, and Sam Francis.

Career

Early career

In 1971 Rapoport discovered a series of vintage geological survey charts from an Idaho Snake River Dam project in an antique architect's desk she had purchased. She used these charts as a background for drawing and painting, as well as stencils she made from found objects. Objects such as a pool-cue holder signified an udder, while a plastic uterus from an anatomy kit stood for the womb: a lexicon of feminine symbols she referred to as her ''Nu-Shu'' language. Nüshu is a script created in the 15th century as a “secret language,” used exclusively by women in Hunan Province, China. Rapoport used this feminist pattern language extensively throughout the 1970s on large-scale paintings as well as mixed-media works on found Continuous stationery, continuous-feed computer paper. In the late 1970s, Rapoport also developed a collaborative practice as her work moved away from painting and drawing into the realm of Installation art, installation, Performance art, performance, and research-based mixed-media projects. She collaborated with research chemists, software engineers, and anthropologists to realize her increasingly complex projects. For instance, as part her collaboration with the anthropologis
Dorothy Washburn
during the 1970s, Rapoport incorporated archeological notations based on the study of Native American artifacts into her computer drawings. Between 1979 and 1983 Rapoport worked on her conceptual project ''Objects on My Dresser'', which unfolded in eleven successive phases over the five-year period. The final, twelfth phase was developed in the last year of Rapoport’s life and exhibited posthumously (2015). ''Objects on My Dresser'' marked Rapoport’s clear departure from her painting and object-making practice and anticipated her later interactive performance and new media work. Rapoport collaborated with psychologis
Winifred de Vos
to interpret the personal significance of mementos and souvenirs that accumulated on her bedroom dresser, examining them through psychoanalysis, computer coding, and scientific methods. The 12 phases ranged from installations and audience participation performances to single-page publications, and artists’ books, presented at venues including Franklin Furnace Archive, Franklin Furnace, Artists Space, and Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, Heresies Magazine. A foundational project in conceptual and feminist art, ''Objects on My Dresser'' was also pioneering in its turn to computing and data visualization. During the 1980s, Rapoport developed related conceptual works that utilized data visualization and computer coding. In some of these projects, Rapoport introduced computer-assisted interactive installations, where the audience was invited to participate and contribute data for the projects’ subsequent iterations. These include ''Biorhythm'', ''Shoe-Field'', ''Digital Mudra'', ''The Animated Soul: Gateway to Your Ka'', and ''Sexual Jealousy: The Shadow of Love''.

Late career

From 1989 to 2013 Rapoport’s artistic focus shifted to Internet art, net art. During this period she produced more than a dozen interactive web projects. Rapoport was an early adopter of internet technology and was affiliated with a community of like-minded creators associated with MIT’
Leonardo
Magazine, including Judy Malloy an
Meredith Tromble
These works were motivated by her interest in the humanistic potential of computers, and informed by her knowledge of programming and experience creating work that responded to viewer’s choices. Reflecting Rapoport’s interest in the social construction of gender, race, and religion, she sourced imagery 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 embody the early internet aesthetic. In the 2010s, Rapoport’s contribution to contemporary art was recognized in two survey exhibitions and the volume ''Pairing of Polarities: The Life and Art of Sonya Rapoport'', edited by Terri Cohn. In 2014, the Bancroft Library of Western Americana at the University of California, Berkeley, University of California Berkeley acquire
Rapoport’s archives

Legacy

Th
Sonya Rapoport Legacy Trust
was established and endowed during Rapoport's lifetime to preserve her work and to broaden its critical and historical recognition. The Trust supports her legacy through a variety of initiatives including exhibitions, loans of artworks, research, publications, conservation, and educational programs for the public and the scholarly communities. It also 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. Study of th
Sonya Rapoport Papers
at the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley is also encouraged.

Recent exhibitions

''Sonya Rapoport: biorhythm'', San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, California, 2020 ''Spotlight'', Frieze New York, 2020 ''The Computer Pays its Debt: Women, Textiles, and Technology'', 1965-1985, Center for Craft, Asheville, NC, 2020 ''Shifting Terrain – Works on Paper from the Collection'', SFMOMA, 2020 ''Refiguring the Future'', Hunter College Art Galleries, New York, 2019 ''Sonya Rapoport: An Aesthetic Response''
Casemore Kirkeby
Gallery, 2019 ''Yes or No?'
Krowswork
Oakland, California 2015 ''ImPOSSIBLE CONVERSATIONS?'' Fresno Art Museum, Fresno, California, 2014 ''ImPOSSIBLE CONVERSATIONS?'' Data Gathering Event. Martina }{ Johnston Gallery, Berkeley, California, 2013 ''Spaces of Life: The Art of Sonya Rapoport''. Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, California, 2012 ''Sonya Rapoport: Pairings of Polarities.'' Kala Institute Art Gallery, Berkeley, California, 2011

References

Bibliography

* Cohn, Terri; Efimova, Alla. ''Sonya Rapoport: Biorhythm''. San Jose Museum of Art, 2020 * Cohn, Terri. "When Sonya Rapoport said 'OK' to computers." ''Frieze'', April 2020 * Barcio, Phillip. "How Sonya Rapoport Used Abstraction to Pioneer Computer Art," ''Ideelart'', February 2020 * Jones, Leslie. "The Personal is Computable: Sonya Rapoport." ''Art in Print'', January 2019 * Cohn, Terri, Efimova, Alla. “Sonya Rapoport: Ensemble Performance.” ''Performa Magazine'', March 2017 * Efimova, Alla; Cohn, Terri. ''Sonya Rapoport: Yes or No?'' Mills College Art Museum, 2016 * Cohn, Terri, ed. ''Pairing of Polarities: the Life and Art of Sonya Rapoport.'' Heyday, 2012

External links

*
Artist's Blog

Sonya Rapoport net art projects
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rapoport, Sonya American women artists Jewish women artists New media artists American conceptual artists American installation artists Feminist artists Abstract expressionist artists Book artists American digital artists Women digital artists Artists from the San Francisco Bay Area People from Brookline, Massachusetts Art Students League of New York alumni University of California, Berkeley alumni George Washington University Corcoran School alumni Massachusetts College of Art and Design alumni 1923 births 2015 deaths