Sonya Rapoport
Sonya Rapoport (6 October 1923, Brookline, Massachusetts - 1 June 2015, Berkeley, California) was a painter, new media, and conceptual artist whose work is characterized by groundbreaking experimentation with computers and data collection, collaboration with scientists and experts in the humanities, a fascination with categorization and systems of knowledge, a consistent reinvestigation of her own earlier work, and a profound feminist mission marked by strategic forays into male dominated fields. Her career represents a unique path from high modernist painting to contemporary conceptual and new media work.
The first woman to receive an MA in Fine Art at UC Berkeley in 1949, Rapoport’s Abstract Expressionist paintings were given a solo exhibition at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in 1963. She went on to explore pattern, painting on printed fabrics and developing a language of feminist stencils. In 1976 Rapoport began drawing on found computer printout paper, eventually leading to her reinvention as a digital artist. Her interactive installations of the early 1980s used computer programs to gather, process, and represent data. She was an integral part of a community of artists experimenting with and communicating via emerging computer technologies. Critical recognition of Rapoport’s contributions gained momentum in the last decade of her life.
Rapoport leaves a 66-year artistic legacy that includes works in a variety of media, including paintings, works on paper, performance artifacts, books, videos, and web art. Her name is recognized nationally and internationally through her participation in over fifty major exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial (2006), Bienal de Arte, Buenos Aires (2002), Zero1 Biennial, Silicon Valley (2012), Violence Without Bodies, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid (2005), and Documenta 8, Kassel, Germany (1987). She was the subject of late-career retrospective exhibitions at KALA Art Institute, Berkeley (2011), Mills College Art Museum, Oakland (2012), The Fresno Art Museum (2013) and the book Pairing of Polarities: The Life and Art of Sonya Rapoport, edited by Terri Cohn (Heyday, 2012). Her archives are preserved in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. (Source)
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