Sonya Rapoport

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Sonya Rapoport

Sonya Rapoport (born October 6, 1923) is an American conceptual/digital artist and multimedia artist who has created computer-assisted 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 where she studied with Karl Zerbe. She spent her childhood summers at the art colony in Ogunquit, Maine[1].

Education

She attended MassArt (Massachusetts College of Art) for two years from 1941 to 1942 and during this period she met Henry Rapoport while he was a Ph.D. Candidate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1942 she was enrolled in a summer philosophy program taught by John Dewey in New York at Columbia University. She then returned to Massachusetts and studied at Boston University from 1943 to 1944, majoring in biology.

She married Henry Rapoport in 1944 and the couple moved to New York. Sonya Rapoport enrolled at 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 of 1946 the couple moved again, this time 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. There Sonya Rapoport studied with Erle Loran, receiving her master's degree in art practice 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.[2].

Artistic evolution

Rapoport's work in the late 1940s explored the human figure in abstracted form. In the 1950s her painting practice shifted, displaying Abstract expressionist influences while abandoning figuration. While developing her ABEX style, she experimented in watercolors. These joint practices culminated in two solo exhibitions; one at the East West Gallery in San Francisco in 1958,[3] and the other at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in 1963.[4] In the mid-1960s, inspired by reading her husband's scientific journals, she began to assemble different canvases into unified works. In these artworks, she incorporated scientific illustrations, graphic forms, and three-dimensional abstract expressionist constructions. These canvases were juxtaposed according to Rapoport's personal aesthetic.[5] Dean Wallace wrote, "As example is Sonya Rapoport who is now tacking together canvases of different expressionist tendencies into a single unit; a work like "Psyche Trio" gives a strange almost schizophrenic feeling. Odd that no one has thought of using this device before.[6]

In the late 1960s, Rapoport helped to found the New York "Pattern painting" movement which she defined as, "buying kinky fabrics and painting out shapes."[7]

The 1970s saw a sea change in Rapoport's artistic vision. In 1971 Rapoport purchased an antique architect's desk, inside of which she discovered a series of geological survey charts on linen paper from 1905. She used these charts as a background for her "pictorial language of shapes". This language consisted of shapes that represented gender symbols, for instance the uterus, a mandarin orange (fetus), cue holder (udders), fleur-de-lis (fetus), the Moon, etc. and which she collected in a "Pandora's Box". These symbols were used again and again in Rapoport's work in this period.

In 1976, after concentrating for many years on painting and drawing, Rapoport turned her attention to electronic media, with the focus of her work oriented towards interdisciplinary and cultural studies. Computer printouts took the place of the "Survey Charts". In 1977 she exhibited mixed-media works on computer printouts at the Union Gallery at San Jose State University. During this period, Rapoport's artworks focused on the representation of overlap between language, symbols, stories from the newspaper, the Bible, and cultural anthropology. She worked with C. Michael Lederer at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, on a project entitled "The Table of Isotopes" in 1977 which dealt with the transformation of Cobalt and Mercury into Gold. Working with the anthropologist Dorothy Washburn in 1978 Rapoport completed "A Shoe-In" held at Berkeley Computer Systems; "Shoe-Field" at Media Gallery in San Francisco, "Interaction: Art and Science" at the Truman Gallery in New York[8], and "Aesthetic Response" at the Peabody Museum at Harvard University.

From 1979 to 1984 Rapoport worked on her largest project to date, entitled Objects On My Dresser. This project unfolded in eleven successive phases. Rapoport began by making personal, visually-based, free-associative connections by which images of the twenty-nine objects on her dresser were correlated with twenty-nine other random images. Her associations varied from formal to cultural to psychological, etc. Later, she developed interactive installations and magazine polls which required that each the fifty-eight objects be grouped into one of six themes: (Hand Chest, Eye, Masking, Threading, and Moving) by people working in three respective fields: artists, scientists, and attorneys. Rapoport correlated the subsequent data to find that each of these groups made different choices when they categorized the visual objects into the six themes. For instance, attorneys, in contrast to both artists and scientists, tended to group objects very narrowly and to choose, amongst themselves, similar categories for similar objects.[9][10]

In 1983 she created a large-scale interactive installation entitled "Biorhythm: How Do You Feel?" at WORKS gallery in San Jose. In this work, Rapoport connected participants to bio-feedback equipment, and asked them to relate their feelings on that particular day. Participants described their emotions both in words and by creating hand gestures that expressed those feelings. Participants then compared their self-assessments with the biofeedback readings. Rapoport then evaluated this information and created an installation as part of the 1984 show "SF/SF San Francisco/ Science Fiction" at the Clocktower in New York.

Four years later, in a 1987 interactive installation at the Kala Institute entitled "Digital Mudrā" Rapoport returned to the data acquired from "Biorhythm: How Do You Feel?". She associated each participant's gesture with one of 52 hand gestures known as Mudrās. In doing so, Rapoport suggested the cross-cultural correlations of hand gestures and their trans-cultural meanings. Mudrās and their word meanings were juxtaposed within a western context and transcribed onto a computer printout and also, into a Kathakali dance. Rapoport discovered that the words people chose to describe their gestures in western culture, and the words given to the gestures in the Mudrā vocabulary were surprisingly similar. Finally, Rapoport created a slide presentation showing current political leaders making similar gestures having similar verbal contexts.[11]

In 1988 she received a grant from the California Arts Council for the production of "Digital Mudrā" online via Carl Loeffler and Fred Truck's Art Com Electronic Network (ACEN). In 1989 a simplified version of "Digital Mudrā" was uploaded to the Internet as a web-based interactive artwork.


the Kala Institute This work was followed by "Redeeming the Gene, Molding the Golem, Folding the Protein" in 2002.[12]

Exhibition history

People Shapers (1978 - 2008)

Selected Art and Technology Exhibitions

Selected Lectures

Chinese Connections, (Artist's Book, 1982) Chinese Word/Picture cards, laminate, yarn, Chinese proverbs, business computer forms

Interactive Installations

  • Generations: Lineage of Influence-Bay Area Art, Richmond Art Center, California, 1996
  • Capp Street Project, 1996
  • Artist Resident Arts Wire, 1995
  • Vuorovaekutus, Kuopio Museum, Kuopio, Finland, 1992
  • The Animated Soul, Takada Arts 1992; Ghia Gallery 1991, San Francisco, California
  • Digital Mudra, KALA Institute, Berkeley, California, 1987
  • Shoe-Field, MEDIA, San Francisco, California, 1986
  • Coping with Sexual Jealousy, Pauley Ballroom Univ. of Calif. Berkeley, 1984
  • Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York, 1984
  • Biorhythm: How do you feel? WORKS/San Jose, California, 1983
  • Back to Nature (Retrospective) Humboldt State Univ. Arcada, California, 1983
  • Shared Dynamics, Artists Space, New York, New York, 1981
  • Shared Dynamics, New School for Social Research, New York, New York, 1981

Selected Solo Installations / Exhibitions

Selected Book-Arts Exhibitions

  • Center for Book Arts, 30 Years of Innovation, New York City, New York 2005
  • Northern Calif. Book Artists, Ctr For Book Arts, New York City, 1998-99 (cat)
  • BOUNDLESS: Liberating the Book Form, San Francisco Ctr for the Book, CA, 1998
  • 1st Columbia Biennal Exhibition of the Book, Columbia College, Chicago, IL
  • WOMEN OF THE BOOK: Jewish Artists, Jewish Themes (traveling), 1997-2000
  • Photographic Book Art in the U. S.(traveling USA), 1992-95
  • Off the Shelf/On Line, Minn.Ctr (traveling NEA) (cat. pub.), 1992-1993
  • Book Arts, USA; U.S. Information Agency (traveling) (cat. pub.), 1992-90
  • Anchorage Museum of Art, Anchorage, Alaska (cat. pub.), 1991-1990
  • National Museum of Women, Washington DC, 1990
  • National Library, Madrid, Spain (cat. pub.), 1982

Painting and Drawing Exhibitions

References

  1. ^ "Digitizing the Golem: From Earth to Outer Space", Leonardo Journal, Vol. 39, No. 2, (MIT, 2006),17.
  2. ^ http://www.calartalumni.org/Artletter03.pdf PDF of "The Eightieth Year, The Berkeley School of Painting: 1930s - 1950", ArtLetter, Berkeley Art Alumni Group, (Summer 2003), 1.
  3. ^ James McCray, "Sonya Rapoport at the East West Gallery", The Argonaut, January 31, 1958]]
  4. ^ Dean Wallace, "Five One-Man Shows at Legion", San Francisco Chronicle, April 3, 1963
  5. ^ "Sonya Rapoport", John Bolles Gallery pamphlet, November 3 - December 4, 1964
  6. ^ Dean Wallace, "A Survey of Bay Area Styles", San Francisco Sunday Chronicle, July 19, 1964, p. 25
  7. ^ Miriam Dungan Cross, "Berkeley Artist Shows Unique Works", Oakland Tribune, August 6, 1967
  8. ^ "Interaction: Art and Science", Truman Gallery Pamphlet, 38 E. 57 NYC January 12 - February 3, 1979.
  9. ^ Judy Malloy and Sonya Rapoport, Objective Connections
  10. ^ Terri Cohn, Tansu, Text, and Technology: Sonya Rapoport’s ‘Objects on My Dresser’, Lecture given at the Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association Conference, October 2007
  11. ^ [Archana Horsting, Seeing Time 87, (Kala Institute Publication, September 3, 1987), 2.]
  12. ^ http://www.htmlles.net/1997/rapoport.html Brutal Myths.


Bibliography

  • Ernestine Daubner, "Manipulating Genetic Identities: The Creation of Chimeras, Cyborgs and (Cyber Golems), Eduardo Kac and Sonya Rapoport", Parachute 105: Autofictions (National Museum of Canada, 2002), 84-91.
  • Stephen Wilson, Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT University Press, 2002). ISBN 0-262-73158-4 and ISBN 978-026-27315-84
  • Margaret Morse, "The Poetics of Interactivity",Women and Technology Art, Ed. Judy Malloy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT University Press, 2003). ISBN 0-262-13424-1 and ISBN 978-0262134248
  • Sonya Rapoport, "Process(ing) Interactive Art: Using People as Paint, Computer as Brush, and Installation Site as Canvas", Women and Technology Art, Ed. Judy Malloy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT University Press, 2003). JSTOR link
  • Frank Popper, From Technological to Virtual Art (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT University Press, 2007), 69-75. ISBN 0-262-16230-X and ISBN 978-0-262-16230-2
  • Debora Wood, Imagining by Numbers: A Historical View of the Computer Print, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press with Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, 2008). ISBN 0-8101-2505-6
  • Sonya Rapoport, "Digging Into the Jewish Roots of Shoe-Field", Jews and Shoes, Ed.Edna Nahshon (Oxford, N.Y.: Berg Publishers: 2008). ISBN 184-7880-509 and ISBN 978-1847-8805-05

External Links


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