News/Research

Farewell to a Berkeley Visionary Sonya Rapoport

07 Jan, 2016

Farewell to a Berkeley Visionary Sonya Rapoport

Marcia Tanner wrote an eloquent farewell to Berkeley visionary Sonya Rapoport, for Berkeleyside in December, discussing Sonya Rapoport: Final Works, an exhibition of her later installation pieces at krowswork in Oakland.

Says Tanner of the exhibition: "Final WorksYes or No? and The Transitive Property of Equality — offer an elegiac coda to Rapoport’s lifetime of art making. Together with rarely seen videos documenting some of her most memorable interactive pieces, they present a poetic and often humorous summing up of her complex and fascinating oeuvre."

Rapoport was a former Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium speaker at the Berkeley Center for New Media. She passed away in June, 2015 and is sorely missed by the art community in the Bay. As Tanner writes:

"There was a covert dimension to Rapoport’s artistic practice[]. Constrained by her role as the decorous UC Berkeley faculty wife of a famous scientist (organic chemist Henry Rapoport, who died in 2002), she was a closet “Bad Girl:” an undercover feminist and philosophical rebel who used humor, parody, coded messages and other forms of veiled resistance to encrypt subversive meanings into her work."

Kroswork was founded in 2009 by Jasmine Moorhead, as an experimental “center for video and visionary art,” exhibiting “artists who push boundaries in all media as well as overlooked historical artists and works."

For the full article, visit Berkeleyside at: http://www.berkeleyside.com/2015/12/11/farewell-to-a-berkeley-visionary-sonya-rapoport-final-works-at-krowswork/

Photo credit: Abe Aronow