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.
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.
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] About these works, Dean Wallace wrote, "Sonya
Rapoport [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.
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."
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 during 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. In these years
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,
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
in 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. Later, she developed interactive installations and
magazine polls which required that each of 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 plotted the subsequent data to find that the three separate groups
made significantly different choices when they categorized the visual objects
into the six themes. Lawyers tended to classify the objects similarly to their
peers, choosing the same categories for similar objects, while the artists and
scientists both displayed broader associative connections when placing the
objects into categories.
In 1983 she created a
large-scale interactive installation entitled "Biorhythm:
How Do You Feel?" at WORKS gallery in
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.
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
The Animated Soul:
Gateway to Your Ka was a site-specific interactive installation
exhibited at the Ghia Gallery, a casket showroom in South San Francisco in 1991, the Takada Gallery
in San Francisco,
and the Kuopio Museum in Finland, in 1992. The Animated Soul, in book format, traveled from 1992-1993 throughout the
In 1993 Sonya Rapoport
produced Sexual Jealousy: The Shadow of Love as an interactive
installation at the Fourth International Symposium on Electronic Art in Minneapolis,
Minnesota.
In this participatory artwork she combined a Gamelan-inspired
algorithmic
multi-channel musical composition by Michael McNabb, with
images from Aubrey Beardsley, Indonesian
shadow
puppets, and Jungian mythological symbols in a computer assisted interactive installation
wherein participants explored their feelings of sexual jealousy
and methods of coming to terms with these feelings. Rapoport designed a "Self-help"
HyperCard
software package in which the user became a protagonist
in a shadow play. The user's choices generated lessons in coping, using clips
from the soap opera,
The Young and the Restless. The
personal emotional subjective states of individual users were linked to
symbolic psychological
representations. These in turn became the components of a narrative
of self-discovery and revelation which subsequently controlled the generation
of music.