SAN JOSE, CA.- Among the first women to earn an MA in Painting from UC Berkeley in 1949, Sonya Rapoport (b. 1923, Brookline, MA; d. 2015, Berkeley, CA) was always a step ahead of her time. Charting her transition from modernist painter to ground-breaking conceptual artist, Sonya Rapoport: biorhythm, on view February 7 through July 5, 2020, provides an in-depth look at the artist’s output from 1974–83, a pivotal decade that marked a major shift in her work from abstract painting to the incorporation of emerging computer technologies.
The first solo museum show since the artist’s passing in 2015, biorhythm highlights Rapoport’s growing fascination with formal and conceptual elements of computer-collected and analyzed personal data, from her large-scale painting in the
San Jose Museum of Art’s permanent collection, Beginning (1974) to geological survey-chart drawings and continuous-feed computer paper works on loan from the Sonya Rapoport Legacy Trust. Biorhythm will also bring together collages, artist books, documentation, and ephemera from Rapoport’s multi-part performance of the same name, Biorhythm (1980–84), which explored participatory interaction with computers.
“Sonya Rapoport: biorhythm demonstrates SJMA’s historical commitment to showcasing pioneering women artists,” says S. Sayre Batton, Oshman Executive Director of San José Museum of Art. “Opening during our fiftieth anniversary year, biorhythm follows a year of exhibitions by female artists: Undersoul: Jay DeFeo; Screen Acts: Women in Film and Video; Catherine Wagner: Paradox Observed; Rina Banerjee: Make me a Summary of the World; and Beta Space: Pae White. Rapoport broached many of our contemporary questions regarding the automated collection and use of personal data decades ago. That inquiry is especially relevant now and we are eager to take up the conversation.”
Rapoport’s prolific career was fueled by a fascination with the linkages between coded systems and the self that was particularly ahead of her time and explored in her early work through symbolic abstractions appropriated from disciplines such as anatomy, botany, and medical imagery. Her interest in computers was sparked in the mid-1970s, when she discovered discarded computer printouts in the Math Department at UC Berkeley and began incorporating them in her work. Fascinated, she took a programming class in 1977, which allowed her to analyze details gathered from her immediate surroundings, like the arrangement of objects on her dresser or her shoe collection. The incorporation of personal data into graph-like drawings—as well as information gathered through collaborations with scientists at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, or with anthropologist Dorothy Washburn—marked a turning point in Rapoport’s career. A selection of these drawings from the late 1970s highlights how her visual mappings moved away from abstract representations to reflect more personal, political, and social issues.
In the 1980s, the artist began tracking personal data into plots and collages through interactive computer-assisted performances—another innovative strategy that became crucial to the evolution of net art in the following decades. The multiyear performance piece Biorhythm (1980–84) relied on collected and analyzed personal data through both self-assessment and technology-based calculating. Using then-popular “biorhythm” computers to measure users’ emotional, physical, and intellectual states and comparing the data to personal accounts, Rapoport charted the correlation between computed and personal assessment. The third phase of the project, perceptively titled The Computer Says I Feel… (1984) deployed this data as fuel for an imagined future in which individuals consult computers to assess their feelings. Rapoport’s critical yet playful anticipation of the intertwining of personal data and computers in the 1980s is almost uncanny. Today, myriad digital applications provide weather reports based on one’s exact location, individual daily horoscopes, and endless personalized content pushed out through computers and smartphones. By comparing computer-generated biorhythms with psychological analysis, Rapoport shrewdly questions the impulse that cultural theorist
Jeanne Randolph described with this turn of phrase: our primary assumption about technology is that it works.
“It’s thrilling to present Rapoport’s work, an artist who worked with modest materials to explore technology,” Kathryn Wade, assistant curator, “and to have this opportunity to show new research on Rapoport’s art and process. She was at the forefront of new media art practices and her keen interest in the quantified-self—and its perils—merits particular consideration today. It’s exciting that SJMA will position her visionary work here in Silicon Valley.”
Sonya Rapoport (1923–2015, born Brookline, Massachusetts; lived and worked in Berkeley) received an MA in painting from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1949. She had her first major solo exhibition in 1963 at the Legion of Honor, San Francisco. The subject of late-career retrospective exhibitions at Kala Art Institute, Berkeley (2011); Mills College Art Museum, Oakland (2012); and Fresno Art Museum (2013), her work can be found in the Bay Area public collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Mills College Art Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and San José Museum of Art. A leader among artists using emerging computer technologies in the 1970s, Rapoport was a frequent contributor to Leonardo, an art, science and technology journal published by the MIT Press.
Organized by Kathryn Wade, assistant curator, with gratitude to the Sonya Rapoport Legacy Trust.
