Background
Rapoport was born in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, on October 6, 1923. She spent her childhood in Brookline, Massachusetts.
2015
Krowswork, Oakland, California, United States
Sonya Rapoport (right) with (left to right): Jasmine Moorhead, director of Krowswork; Tooth, filmmaker; and Anne Lesley Selcer, poet and media artist, February 2015, Krowswork.
621 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA 02115, USA
In the year 1941, Sonya Rapoport entered Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
116th St & Broadway, New York, NY 10027, United States
In 1942 Rapoport was enrolled in a summer philosophy program taught by John Dewey in New York at Columbia University.
Boston, MA 02215, USA
Rapoport transferred to Boston University to study Biology between 1943 and 1944.
New York, NY 10003, USA
In 1944 Rapoport enrolled in New York University and, in 1946, she received her Bachelor of Arts in Labor Economics.
215 W 57th St, New York, NY 10019, USA
Sonya Rapoport attended the Art Students League of New York. There she studied with Reginald Marsh.
Washington, D.C., United States
In 1946 Sonya Rapoport entered the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design to study figurative art and oil painting.
Berkeley, CA, USA
Sonya Rapoport studied at the Art Department of the University of California, Berkeley, with Erle Loran and received a Master of Arts in Painting in 1949.
Sonya Rapoport with her works.
Young Sonya Rapoport.
Rapoport was born in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, on October 6, 1923. She spent her childhood in Brookline, Massachusetts.
As a child, Sonya Rapoport attended Saturday classes at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and also spent summers at the art colony in Ogunquit, Maine. In the year 1941 she entered Massachusetts College of Art. A year later, she was enrolled in a summer philosophy program taught by John Dewey in New York at Columbia University. She then transferred to Boston University to study Biology between 1943 and 1944.
In 1944 Rapoport enrolled in New York University and, in 1946, she received her Bachelor of Arts in Labor Economics. After that, she attended the Art Students League of New York. There she studied with Reginald Marsh. In September 1946 Sonya Rapoport moved to Washington, D.C., where she entered the Corcoran School of Art to study figurative art and oil painting.
Sonya Rapoport studied at the Art Department of the University of California, Berkeley, with Erle Loran and received a Master of Arts in Painting in 1949.
Rapoport’s early figurative and abstract-expressionist artworks were the subject of a personal exhibition at the California Palace of the Legion of Honour in 1963. Following the show, she surprised numerous critics and mentors by giving up the dominant Abstract Expressionist style of her painting. In the new Fabric Paintings of the period 1966-1969 she challenged herself as she bought pre-printed commercial fabrics and used them as her canvas. At that time she experimented with appropriated materials, silkscreen and acrylic paint on inexpensive textiles.
The 1970s witnessed a new shift in Sonya Rapoport's artistic vision. In 1971 Rapoport discovered a series of antique geological survey charts in a desk she had bought. Drawing and painting directly on these, she further developed her pictorial language of shapes to represent gendered symbols. As her interest in the meaning of these symbols grew, the painter began copying elements from the survey charts to produce her own paintings.
In early 1976 Rapoport turned her attention to electronic media, with the focus of her work oriented towards interdisciplinary and cultural studies. She used a limited palette of coloured pencil and letter stencils to create her abstract drawings. She later collaborated with Professor of Anthropology Dorothy Washburn, creating drawings on printouts representing analysis of symmetry in Anasazi pottery design.
In 1977 the artist exhibited mixed-media artworks on computer printouts at the Union Gallery at San Jose State University. Rapoport’s later computer drawings were the embodiment of a research-based practice in which she collaborated with numerous top experts in the sciences and humanities. Developed alongside her groundbreaking computer mediated interactive installations, many of her works drew her attention to herself and her psychological constitution, discovering her personal history, her family, and domestic objects. From 1979 to 1984 Rapoport worked on her largest project to date, entitled Objects On My Dresser.
Sonya Rapoport’s computer-assisted interactive installations of the early 1980s were among the earliest artworks to use computers in gallery contexts. She worked with coders to create programs that gathered data about participants’ choices and used algorithms to analyze their personality. In 1983 she made a large-scale interactive installation titled "Biorhythm: How Do You Feel?", which was held at WORKS gallery in San Jose.
In most of her projects, including Objects On My Dresser; Biorhtythm: The Computer Says I Feel, Digital Mudrā; and Shoe Field, Sonya Rapoport used idiosyncratic and playful rubrics to create data portraits of her subjects. With the computer acting as a candid intermediary, these projects allowed her to broach intimate topics with her audience such as sexuality, psychological well-being, and beliefs about one’s personal attributes.
In 1988 she obtained 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). The following year, a simplified version of "Digital Mudrā" was uploaded to the Internet as a web-based interactive artwork.
In the 1990s she created The Animated Soul: Gateway to Your Ka. It 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. In 1993 Sonya Rapoport became an author of Sexual Jealousy: The Shadow of Love, an interactive installation. It was publicly presented at the Fourth International Symposium on Electronic Art in Minneapolis.
Between 1993 and 1996 Rapoport produced The Transgenic Bagel, which was an interactive computer-assisted artwork, with a gene splicing theme. Starting from 1996, the artist created artworks specifically as websites. There she showed an interest in liberal feminist issues.
Among her later works and collections were Make Me A Man (1997), Arbor Erecta: A Botanical Concept For Masculinity (1998), Make Me A Jewish Man: An Alternative Masculinity (1999), Kabbalah/Kabul: Sending Emanations to the Aliens (2004), (in)AUTHENTIC: Woman, War, Jew (2007), etc.
A retrospective exhibition of Sonya Rapoport's work, "Sonya Rapoport: Pairings and Polarities" took place at the Kala Institute from 4 March to 9 April 2011. Another retrospective of her work was held at the Mills College Art Museum in January 2012. In 2013 the collage, video, and interactive installation entitled "ImPOSSIBLE CONVERSATIONS?" was presented at the Fresno Museum of Art alongside her early "Pattern and Design" paintings from the 1960s.
Since 1996 Sonya Rapoport became extremely interested in Feminism. This interest was reflected in her numerous artworks.
She married Henry Rapoport in 1944. She met him while studying at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design; he was a Doctor of Philosophy Candidate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The marriage produced a daughter, Hava Rapoport, and two sons, David and Robert Rapoport. Her husband passed away in 2002.