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.
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.
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, and the other at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in 1963. 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. 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 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.
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 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 United States
under an NEA grant. In this show, set in a tomb environment,
viewer-participants interacted with a HyperCard computer program which prompted
them to make a series of choices represented by icons. By going through this
process, users reenacted the ritual sequence laid out in the Egyptian Book of
the Dead in order to discover their double, who in turn would lead them to everlasting
life. A full explanation of this work with image can be found here.
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.
This work was followed by "Redeeming the Gene, Molding the Golem, Folding
the Protein" in 2002
Exhibition history
Selected Art and
Technology Exhibitions
- ITR2008, NeMe,
Moscow and Ekatrinburg, Russia 2008
- Karl Kasten Retrospective, Worth Ryder Gallery, University of California,
Berkeley,
2008
- IMAGING BY NUMBERS, Mary and Leigh Block Museum
of Art, Northwestern University, Evanston,
Illinois, 2008
- BIOS 4,Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville,
Spain,
2007
- Center for Jewish
Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison,
Wisconsin, 2007
- 4th International
Symposium of Interactive Media Design, Istanbul, Turkey,
2006
- Whitney Biennial 2006,
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, New York, 2006
- Museum of Contemporary
Art, 'For Everyone and No One',
North Miami, Florida, 2005
- San Francisco Museum
of Art Gallery,
KALA 30 Something, San Francisco,
2005
- Pixel Pops, City Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut,
2005
- Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, violence without bodies, Madrid, Spain, 2005
- le-musee
di-visioniste in Cologne, Germany,
2004
- SETI Workshop, Encoding Altruism: Interstellar
Messaging, Paris,
France,
2003
- Bienal de Arte, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires,
Argentina, 2002
- University of California Alumni Exhibition, Berkeley, California,
2002
- Universities Art Assoc.
Conference, University of Quebec, Montreal,
Canada,
2001
- HIGH TOUCH/HIGH TECH, Oakland Museum of Art, Oakland, California,
2000
- Refusalon Gallery, San Francisco, California,
2000
- Axis Reader on Gender
and New Media, Amsterdam, the Netherlands,
2000
- Invencao, Instituto Itau
Cultural, Sao Paulo, Brasil, 1999
- Graphic Electronic, Puebla, Mexico, 1999
- DIGITAL SALON, 1999:
Italy Triennale di
Milano, 1999
- DIGITAL SALON, Spain: Sala de Exposiciones
CAM, Alicante; Circulo de Bellas Artes, Madrid; Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona, 1999
- Touchware, SIGGRAPH 98, Orlando, Florida,
1998
- The Best of 2 Worlds, net.art -Aleph, Arco Electronico
Spain,
1998
- Art + Bio - Univ. Art
Gallery, Central
Michigan University,
Mt. Pleasant, Michigan,
1998
- Finding the Fulcrum, LEONARDO's 30th Anniversary, Minna
Street Gallery, San Francisco,
California, 1997
- Mill Valley
Film Festival, California,
1997
- Modesto Junior College Art Gallery, California, 1997
- Fotofeis 97, Scottish Bienale
Festival, 1997
- DIGITAL SALON (95, 96,
97, 98), New York City,
New York
- Mill Valley Film Festival 1997
- Euphrat Museum, De Anza College,
Cupertino, California, 1997
- Maid in Cyberspace-le festival XX d'Art WWW, Montreal, Canada,
1997]]
- ISEA (International
Symposium on Electronic Art) 1993, 95, 96, 99, Copenhagen
Film Festival, Denmark, 1996
- Siggraph95, Los Angeles, California,
1995
- The World's Women On-Line, Beijing, China, 1995
- Artists Shedding Light on Science, San Francisco State
University, California,
1994
- CADRE (Computers, Art,
Design, Research, Education) San Jose, California, 1989-1984
- Digital Concepts and
Expressions, Tish
Art Gallery,
New York University, 1988
- Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley Art Museum,
University of California, Berkeley, California,
1984
- Baxter Gallery,
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena,
California, 1976
- Ars Electronica,
Linz, Austria, 1989-1992
- Documenta 8, Kassel,
West Germany,
1987
Selected Lectures
- The Art, Technology and
Culture Colloquium, University of
California, Berkeley, 2004
- San Francisco Art Institute,
Digital Studies Program, San
Francisco, California,
2004
- The Oakland Museum
of Art, KALA Institute: High Touch, High Tech, California 2000
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
- Psycho-Aesthetic
Dynamics, 80 Langton Street,
San Francisco, California,
1980
- Pictorial Linguistics,
Franklin Furnace, New York City,
New York, 1979
- Bonito-Rapoport Shoes, Donnell
Center, New York
Public Library, 1979
- Interaction Art and
Science, Truman Gallery, New
York City, New York,
1979
- Peabody Museum,
Harvard University,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1978
- California (Crocker) Art Museum, Sacramento, California,
1974
- San Jose Museum
of Art, San Jose, California,
1974
- John Bolles Gallery, San
Francisco, California,
1964, 1967, 1970, 1972
- California Palace
of the Legion of Honor, San
Francisco, California,
1963
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
- Museum of Contemporary
Art, Northern Miami, Florida, 2005
- San Francisco Museum of Modern Art , Artist's Gallerry, 2005
- Women Artists of the USA, São
Paulo, Brasil (cat.
pub.), 1980
- Painting &
Sculpture Now, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana,
1980
- Art Scene, San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art, California, 1973
- 100 American Drawings, University of Michigan (cat.pub.)
Ann Arbor, Michigan 1965
- Annual Exhibitions, San
Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, California 1964-1950, 2005
© http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonya_Rapoport
[Second Paper] [Introduction] [Sonya Rapoport] [James Green] [Spatial References] [Pandanus tree] [Conclusion] [Bibliography]
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