Sonya Rapoport


Sonya Rapoport was an American conceptual/digital artist and New media artist who created computer-assisted interactive installations and participatory web-based artworks.

Early life

Sonya 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 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 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 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."

1970s

The 1970s saw a sea change in Rapoport's artistic vision. In 1971 she 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, cue holder, fleur-de-lis, 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.
and her husband John E. Casida.
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.

1980s

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: 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. In 1989, a simplified version of "Digital Mudrā" was uploaded to the Internet as a web-based interactive artwork.

1990s

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.
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. 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.
From 1993 to 1996 Rapoport produced, in several phases, The Transgenic Bagel, an interactive computer-assisted artwork, with a gene splicing theme. Participants were invited to gamble for the "splice of life" in the "Bagel Casino". Traits were extracted from mythological animals residing in Noah's "Virtual Ark". The "winning" trait gene was processed and injected into a section of a bagel. Participants could accept the gene by eating the recombinant transgenic bagel, or they could trade the trait.
1995 saw the production of "Smell Your Destiny", another parodic interactive web art project much in the same vein as "The Transgenic Bagel". In this artwork, Rapoport posited that traits historically considered undesirable are now considered more desirable. For example, aggressiveness and competitiveness were once considered negative traits when displayed by women, but now such traits are seen as a key to success in the corporate environment. Rapoport proposed that these new values and traits might be administered to a population by means of aromatherapy. She introduced the idea that pharmaceutical pills that carried specific favorable traits could be fed to fish living near or within a given society. After consuming the pills, the fish would give off a "stink" that would permeate the air and be inhaled by the inhabitants of the surrounding community, thus transmitting the desired traits / societal values to its citizens. This process was historically specific, in that pills fed to fish in the Qumran region in 150 BCE would have been different from those fed to fish today. This piece displayed Rapoport's characteristic love of word play...for instance, the names of the pills given to the fish were all puns of common over-the-counter products, e.g. "Anvil", All-to-rest, Chums, My-Thrill, Contract, No-mor-fussin, and Re-lax, etc.
From 1996 onward, Rapoport created artworks specifically as websites in which she exhibited an interest in liberal feminist issues. In 1996 she created "Brutal Myths" with collaborator Marie-Jose Sat. "Brutal Myths" was inspired by the sadistic male fantasies about women as found in the Malleus Maleficarum, a manual for witch-hunting written by Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger in the 15th century. Because women were traditionally the lay healers of their societies and used ancient herbs in their medicinal practices, Rapoport used representations of herbs as the metaphoric interface of the web artwork. The first section of "Brutal Myths" describes the "evil" herbs that contaminated the minds of men and made them believe in the dictums laid forth in the Malleus Malificarum. In the second section, the participant "plants" a "blissful" herbal garden of “blessed” herbs. By participating in interactive rituals with the herbs the viewer destroys the prejudicial myths about women and assuages the fears of the men.
"Make Me A Man" marked a change in Rapoport's voice as an artist wherein she adopted the theoretical standpoint of a man, a voice which she carried through works of the next few years. The artwork reflected on what Rapoport saw as "the stereotype of modern manhood" and reflected on the way that stereotype has been sustained by cultures as diverse as those of Western Europe and the New Guinea Highlands. Both of these cultures acknowledge the superiority of the physiological woman, said to be born with all the vital organs and fluids necessary for giving birth and nurturing an infant. This is contrasted to men who must be molded by the society to conform to an "Ideal" masculinity. Both cultures have a similar gender dogma. Comparative examples of how tribal or technological societies achieve their objective of "growing a man" provide the structure of the work.
"Arbor Erecta: A Botanical Concept For Masculinity" continued Rapoport's exploration of narrative from the male perspective. This artwork centered around the ethos of the 159 CE. Greek physician Galen who declared "God created plants as a provision for the health of human beings, and left a sign on them – some feature of their shape, color, habitat or behavior–for human beings to decipher." For example, Galen pointed to a plant shaped like an ear that was used as a cure for ear-aches. The artwork fancifully interweaves a news story about "James" with representations of the New Guinea initiation rite of "tree bonding". In the artwork, as James grows from his female body into that of a male, he re-enacts certain New Guinean tribal rituals that purported to purge the female pollutants acquired from the mother from the body of the initiated man.
In 1998-99, strongly influenced by the book "Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man" by Daniel Boyarin, Rapoport created "Make Me A Jewish Man: An Alternative Masculinity", which she described as exploring the paradox of rabbinic masculinity. In this, the rabbinic male seeks to usurp for himself the female's characteristics, while at the same time, coupling these acquired feminine aspects with his dominant role as a male. This practice is what leads to the marginalization and exclusion of women. Although appropriations of "femaleness" are necessary in the production of the Jewish male "Ideal", strong gender biases are associated with both the blood of circumcision and the blood of childbirth. Rapoport's project addressed the question of a reversal of female penis envy, that is, how do men cope with the envy of birthing and nurturing? Her main goal was to provide an explanation for male "coping mechanisms" as related to male appropriations of "femaleness," under Talmudic Law in the year 400 CE. A secondary theme was the developing metaphor of the morphology of the Olive Tree for which the Lord named Israel. During interactive interruptions in the narrative, Olive Oyl, wife of macho Popeye, provided the feminist voice which objected to the gender imbalance of the material. For her research on the cultivation of olives, Rapoport used material from her daughter Hava Rapoport's chapter in the book "El Cultivo del Olivo".

2000s

This work was followed by "Redeeming the Gene, Molding the Golem, Folding the Protein" in 2002. Returning to the feminist voice Rapoport created a mythic parody designed to be viewed on the Internet. In it, she wanted to challenge the current genetic engineering technology by creating an artificial, the Golem, according to the ancient Hebraic ritual directions given in the Kabbalah. In the story, Lilith and Eve, maligned sources of female evil for many years reinvented themselves by creating an ethical gene that they used to mold the Golem. The "Kabbalah gene", displaced the "artist's gene" that Eduardo Kac invented in his artwork, "Genesis."
In 2004, Rapoport produced "Kabbalah/Kabul: Sending Emanations to the Aliens". This work, another interactive web artwork concerned with the transmission of traits, opened with an image of a US helicopter carrying the Kabbalah’s major icon, the Tree of Life, whose branches are marked with altruistic "emanations". This time, Rapoport proposed that encoded altruistic traits could be transmitted across interstellar space by radio or laser signals. When the participant selects an emanation by clicking on its icon, an associated image of a stem cell within a cell cluster differentiates a body part. The selected cell is eventually enhanced with a DNA altruistic trait in preparation for delivery to the extraterrestrials. Participants absorb the altruism into their psyches as the messages are catapulted from earth into outer space. "Kabbalah/Kabul" endeavors to integrate the infinite outer universe with the altruistic universe that resides within each person on Earth.
"AUTHENTIC: Woman, War, Jew" was created as a "Memory Theatre" in collaboration with Robert Edgar. The work exists as an interactive website that builds itself while the viewer watches. Memory Theatres were first formulated in the 16th century by Giulio Camillo as a way to sense the structure of the cosmos through painting, text and architecture. in the artwork, Rapoport reflects upon her own cosmos of gender, race, science, and mythology in the artwork. Images used include those of various military tanks, African hairstyles mitochondria and Jungian mythological images. These were accompanied by audio recordings consisting of an imaginary contentious dialogue between Luce Irigaray, Sigmund Freud and Jean-Paul Sartre. In the "play" these voices trigger an invasion of robotic tank warfare into the cosmology of Rapoport’s persona. The concept of theatre in this work takes on two meanings: in once sense it refers to a theatre of memory; in another sense it refers to a theatre of war. Within these co-extensive theatres, an army tank, a phallic metaphor, moves between what Rapoport considers authentic and what is inauthentic as found in the aggressive environments of gender, war and religion.

2010s

A retrospective exhibition of Rapoport's work, "Sonya Rapoport: Pairings and Polarities" was held at the Kala Institute from 4 March to 9 April 2011. Another retrospective of her work is planned for the Mills College Art Museum in January 2012.
In 2013 the collage, video, and interactive installation "ImPOSSIBLE CONVERSATIONS?" was shown at the Fresno Museum of Art alongside Rapoport's early "Pattern and Design" paintings from the 1960s. In 2014 the archives of her life's work were accepted at the Bancroft Library of Western Americana at UC Berkeley.

Legacy

The was established and endowed during Rapoport's lifetime to preserve her work and to broaden its critical and historical recognition. The trust supports her legacy through a variety of initiatives including exhibitions, loans of artworks, research, publications, conservation, and educational programs for the public and the scholarly community. It also maintains a collection of Rapoport's artwork in a variety of media and encourages collaborative projects with artists, writers, and scientists in recognition of Rapoport’s unique methodology. Study of the at the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley is also encouraged.

Exhibition history

;Solo Exhibitions
;Selected Group Shows
;Selected Lectures
;Interactive Installations
;Selected Solo Installations / Exhibitions
;Selected Book-Arts Exhibitions
, Chinese proverbs, business computer forms''
;Painting and Drawing Exhibitions