AUGUST 12, 2021
Sonya Rapoport Objects on My Dresser 1979-83; 2015
Objects On My Dresser, Contemporary photograph of selected objects (2015).
Guide to the Collection Sonya Rapoport Legacy Trust sonyarapoport.org
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"My work is an aesthetic response triggered by scientific data." – Sonya Rapoport, 1979 Sonya Rapoport's genre-defying, multi-faceted, extended project Objects on My Dresser is an important contribution to the canon of Conceptual and Feminist art. A leader of the early West Coast digital art movement, Rapoport was one of the first women to explore the intersections of art, science, and computing. Created in twelve iterations over a forty-year period, Rapoport’s germinal artwork Objects on My Dresser has only recently been fully examined and interpreted.
Objects On My Dresser, Pictorial Linguistics, detail of artists book, 1979
In 1979, motivated by the recent passing of her mother, Rapoport entered into a relationship with psychologist Winifred de Vos that was part therapy, part creative collaboration. During the analytic process, Rapoport selected 28 meaningful mementoes that had accumulated on her bedroom dresser. One example is 'Mother’s Ceramic Cat,' a figurine given to the artist by her late mother, which became a surrogate for the complex mother-daughter relationship. The objects, ranging from travel souvenirs to family photos and small gifts, became the anchors for the analysis: capsules of personal associations, as well as the characters in an evolving narrative.
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Objects On My Dresser, Pictorial Linguistics. Exhibition invitation, Franklin Furnace, NY, 1979. Computer type on IBM data-input punch card.
In the manner of Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973-79), which mapped an evolving mother-child relationship, Objects on My Dresser played an important role in feminist art's affirmation of domestic experience as the subject of a grand-scale artistic investigation. Rapoport’s breakthrough was to turn to a newly available tool—the computer—and to use the data from psychoanalysis to code, plot, and graph her interior experience, thus creating a groundbreaking data-based self-portrait.
Rapoport realized Objects On My Dresser in a variety of forms, including plotterprinted graphs, illustrated computer printout drawings, collages, installation art, interactive data-gathering events, handmade artist book editions, publications, audio recordings, and web art. She actively worked on the project between 1979 and 1983, in what she called eleven 'phases' (or iterations), that were presented at alternative art venues, such as 80 Langton in San Francisco, Franklin Furnace and Artists Space in New York, and Locus in Los Angeles. The twelfth, final phase was created during the last year of her life while she was reviewing and inventorying her personal archives, and exhibited posthumously in 2015 at Krowswork in Oakland.
Guide to Appendices
A B C
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Rapoport assigned her phase numbering system retroactively; generally the phases coincide with exhibition, performance, and publication events, which are listed chronologically in Appendix A. The collection proposed for acquisition comprises the 28 original artifacts, computer-generated drawings and collages, artist’s books, and publications, detailed in Appendix B in the attached Primary Collection Inventory. Additionally, a list of Related Items from the estate’s collection is included for reference in Appendix C. It features installation elements, various exploratory printouts, ephemera, artist book editions, and variations. These items can be made available upon request.
Objects on My Dresser (detail), 1979. B/W photograph.
Sonya Rapoport RECENT EXHIBITIONS San Jose Museum of Art (2020) SFMOMA (2020) BAMPFA (2017, 2018) Krowswork (2015) Mills College Art Museum (2012) Kala Art Institute (2011) Whitney Biennial (2006) Museo Reina Sofia (2005) Bienal de Arte, Buenos Aires (2002) Documenta 8 (1987)
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SELECTED COLLECTIONS Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Getty Research Institute San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Museum of Modern Art, NY San Jose Museum of Art Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive Mills College Art Museum Bancroft Library Victoria & Albert Museum Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Franklin Furnace Archives Grey Art Gallery, New York University Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
RECENT BIBLIOGRAPHY Alla Efimova and Terri Cohn, Biorhythm. (San Jose Museum of Art, 2020) Terri Cohn, “When Sonya Rapoport Said OK to Computers,” Frieze (April 21, 2020) Leslie Jones, “The Personal is Computable: Sonya Rapoport,” Art In Print (vol. 8, no. 5, Jan.-Feb., 2019) 15-20. Alla Efimova and Terri Cohn, "Sonya Rapoport: Ensemble Performance," Performa (March 22, 2017) Alla Efimova, Terri Cohn, Farley Gwazda, Yes or No? (Mills College Art Museum, 2016) Terri Cohn, ed. Pairing of Polarities: The Life and Art of Sonya Rapoport, ed. (Heyday, 2012)
Objects on My Dresser Links to Research Resources
SONYA RAPOPORT PAPERS THE BANCROFT LIBRARY, UC BERKELEY DIGITIZED AUDIO AND VIDEO DOCUMENTATION, THE BANCROFT LIBRARY, UC BERKELEY SONYA RAPOPORT LEGACY TRUST WEBSITE DIGITIZED PRIMARY SOURCE TEXTS, SRLT WEBSITE VIDEO INTERVIEWS WITH SCHOLARS AND CURATORS ABOUT OBJECTS ON MY DRESSER
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SONYA RAPOPORT (b. 1923, Brookline, MA; d. 2015, Berkeley, CA) was a conceptual artist best known for a visual language that appropriated the aesthetics of science and digital media. Her work is characterized by groundbreaking experimentation with computers and data collection, collaboration with eminent 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.
Among the first women to receive an M.A. in Painting (UC Berkeley, 1949), Rapoport had a solo exhibition of her Abstract Expressionist work at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in 1963. She went on to explore pattern painting on printed fabrics, and to develop a personal pictographic vocabulary using recontextualized stencils. In 1976 Rapoport began drawing on found computer printout paper, eventually leading to her reinvention as a digital artist. She used computer programs to gather, process, and represent data for her interactive installations during the 1980s and was an integral part of a community of artists experimenting with emerging computer technology. Rapoport was actively involved in Leonardo, an art, science, and technology journal published by MIT Press. Critical recognition of her contributions gained momentum in the last decade of her life. Her archives are preserved in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.
Anonymous, Sonya Rapoport, Objects on My Dresser installation, 1979. B/W photograph
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ABOUT THE SONYA RAPOPORT LEGACY TRUST
Sonya Rapoport Legacy Trust was established to preserve the artist’s work and to broaden its critical and historical recognition. It supports Rapoport’s legacy through a variety of initiatives, including exhibitions, loans of artworks, research, publications, conservation, and museum acquisitions. The Trust 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. It also encourages the study of the Sonya Rapoport Archives at the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.
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ADVISERS TO THE SONYA RAPOPORT LEGACY TRUST Alla Efimova, Ph.D., is a contemporary art curator and museum specialist with a background in critical theory. She is the founder and principal of KunstWorks, a consulting agency that addresses the growing need for legacy planning among artists of the post-war generation. She is the former Director and Chief Curator of The Magnes at the University of California Berkeley, one of the largest museum collections of Jewish art and history. Efimova is an author of several books and catalogs and has taught art history and museum studies at the University of California Berkeley, Santa Cruz, and Irvine as well as the San Francisco Art Institute. Terri Cohn, M.A., is a curator, writer, and art historian. Her consulting practice, Terri Cohn Art Services, provides writing, curatorial, and appraisal services for artists, galleries, and museums, and advises artist’s estates. From 2005-2015 she worked collaboratively with Sonya Rapoport, and has continued as an advisor to the Sonya Rapoport Legacy Trust. Her curatorial positions have included Mills College Art Museum, Berkeley Art Museum (BAMPFA), San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, the Jewish Museum San Francisco, and Berkeley Art Center, and she has authored numerous essays for catalogs, books, and publications including Public Art Review, Art in America, frieze.com, and caa.reviews. Cohn taught art history, critical theory, and professional practices at the San Francisco Art Institute and University of California Berkeley’s Art and Design Extension program for more than two decades. She has given talks at museums, galleries, and colleges across the US and co-produced an interview series about Objects on my Dresser with Alla Efimova for the Sonya Rapoport Legacy Trust.
Appendix A
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Objects on My Dresser Phases and Available Items
Phase 1: Pictorial Linguistics 1979 Mixed-media installation Franklin Furnace, New York KPFA Art Talk with Don Joyce, San Francisco
Objects On My Dresser, Postcard, 1979. Color print on cardstock, 4” x 6”
Rapoport designated 28 objects as a set, including family photos, travel souvenirs, and other mementos, then numbered and described them by their attributes, which were idiosyncratic associations derived from the psychoanalytic sessions with Winifred de Vos.
Pictorial Linguistics Key 1979
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Rapoport’s psychoanalytic sessions gave rise to word and image associations among the selected objects. The collection contains several superb folios featuring plotter printed line graphs that reveal how Rapoport experimented with representing data that was mined during the psychoanalytic process. Her addition of annotations, drawings, and typed text turns these computer-generated infographics into unique artworks. Also included is a related set of smaller drawings and graphs printed on scrolled computer paper. These extend Rapoport’s scientific analysis of the significance of her objects. Additionally there is a set of 60 original IBM computer punch cards used in the creation of these graphs, and collaged with images of the Rapoport’s objects.
Objects On My Dresser is a research-based project expressed in a wide variety of media, but computer and data analysis is at the core of its conceptual methodology and physical materiality. Rapoport, who first gained prominence as an abstract expressionist, had primarily thought of herself as a painter as recently as 1976. Her mid-career metamorphosis into a computer artist began with a chance find of continuous feed printout papers in a waste bin in the Mathematics Department at UC Berkeley. Fascinated by their appearance, she appropriated them as the substrate of her Yarn Drawings (1976). Then, in 1979, she took a FORTRAN programming course on campus, and began making artwork through a process of collecting data, processing it via original code, printing charts and graphs, and incorporating these into drawings embellished with illustrations and collage. Objects On My Dresser is by far the most ambitious and developed example of this body of work.
Pictorial Linguistics Programmed and Plotted
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1979
Plotter print on vellum, computer print, photocopy, solvent transfer, collage, colored type, colored pencil, ink stamp, and graphite on continuous-feed computer paper Two folios: 11 and 13 pages each
Pictorial Linguistics
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1979
. Details of individual pages. Colored typewriter, colored pencil, and solvent transfer on continuous feed printout paper. Each page 11 x 14.875 inches
Pictorial Linguistics
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1979
Details of individual pages. Colored typewriter, colored pencil, and solvent transfer on continuous feed printout paper. Each page 11 x 14.875 inches
Pictorial Linguistics
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1979
Details of individual pages. Colored typewriter, colored pencil, and solvent transfer on continuous feed printout paper. Each page 11 x 14.875 inches
Pictorial Linguistics
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1979
Details of individual pages. Colored typewriter, colored pencil, and solvent transfer on continuous feed printout paper. Each page 11 x 14.875 inches
Pictorial Linguistics
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1979
Details of individual pages. Colored typewriter, colored pencil, and solvent transfer on continuous feed printout paper. Each page 11 x 14.875 inches
Phase 2: Psycho-Aesthetic Dynamics
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1980 Mixed-media installation with projection and audio 80 Langton Street, San Francisco
Photo documentation of installation at 80 Langton Street, San Francisco. Installation components include six sets of 30 cards with labels and photocopy on cardboard, with cardboard support on reverse. Digital audio available
In the installation, Rapoport displayed the computergenerated spiderweb plot (her data-based self-portrait) in three dimensions. The themed axes of the spiderweb plot (Threading, Masking, Moving, Hand, Chest, and Eye) were derived from her personal image-object associations during psychoanalytic sessions with her collaborator Winifred de Vos. The cards placed along the axes represent Rapoport's image associations with the original 28 objects.
Photocopy on paper fixed to cardboard with cardboard support on reverse, 8 x 6-¼ inches each
Psycho-Aesthetic Dynamics Object Cards
1980
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Phase 3: Shared Dynamics
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1981 Participatory performance Artists Space, New York New School for Social Research, New York Sarah Lawrence College, New York
The performances invited the participants to move the image cards along the spiderweb plot axes in order to make their own object-word-image associations. In effect, the participants created snapshots of their individual psychological spaces. Rapoport graphed the data from these participatory performances to create large-scale data drawings. Objects on My Dresser, Analysis of Group Choice: Cover (detail), 1981 Colored type, plotter print, colored pencil, pencil on continuous feed vellum, 12-½ x 51 inches
Photo documentation of studio performance
Shared Dynamics
1981
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Shared Dynamics
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1981
Shared Dynamics: Law, Science, Art Themes, 1983. Photocopy, colored pencil, collage on paper, 36.5 x 127 inches
Phase 4: Exhibition in Print 1981 Interactive publication project Published in the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art (LAICA) Journal, No. 31, Winter 1981
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Phase 5: The Object Connection
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1982 Interactive public installation with audio The WINDOW, 893 Folsom Street, San Francisco
Installation view. Digital audio available.
Phase 6: A 20th Century Portrait
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1982 Mixed-media window installation in collaboration with Winifred de Vos Locus, 5208 Santa Fe, Los Angeles The apex of Rapoport’s experimentation with representing “soft” data is the spiderweb plot that visualizes the three-dimensional array of object, word, and image relationships, creating a radical self-portrait. Rapoport called it the NETWEB. The chart displays six radial axes labeled with themes distilled from her psychoanalytic sessions with Winifred de Vos.
Rapoport made an important critical contribution to the emerging field of computer art in the late 1970s and 80s, later embracing Web Art, which eventually led to her being a respected elder of the medium via her leadership position on the board of MIT’s Leonardo journal. Her work is characterized by the application of an analytical, quantitative approach to what she called “soft material” - data about personal or domestic subjects. Objects On My Dresser and related interactive computermediated installation projects such as Shoe-Field (1981-89) and Biorhythm (1980-86) were uncannily prescient of the way contemporary social media companies collect and process vast quantities of personal data. Revealingly, one of the most important iterations of Objects On My Dresser, was a graph representing data about the artist entitled A 20th Century Portrait (1979).
A 20th Century Portrait 1982
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A 20th Century Portrait, 1979 (exhibited 1982) plotter print, colored pencil and pencil on vellum, 35-½ x 31 inches
A 20th Century Portrait (Self-Portrait)
1979
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Phase 7: Back to Nature
Back to Nature, Artist's Book, (detail), type on paper, photograph, 18.25 x 14.25 inches.
1983 Exhibition and artist’s book Humboldt State University, Arcata, California
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Phase 8: Project for Heresies Magazine 1983 Artist’s Project Published in Heresies Magazine, no. 18
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Phase 9: Chinese Connections
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1982 Artist's book
Artist’s book. Chinese word/picture cards, laminate, yarn, Chinese proverbs, and business computer forms
Phase 10: Periodic Table of the Elements
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1979 Collage on found periodic table of the elements Published on cover of Leonardo, Vol. 30, no. 4, 1997
Photocopy, mixed media collage, and prismacolor on found periodic table chart, 1979. 41.5 x 57 inches.
Phase 11: Isomorphic Series Surface 1981 Artist’s book
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Surface: Large Horizontal, 1981. Photocopy on acetate, photocopy and colored pencil on paper (original installation documentation), 24 x 213.5 inches.
Throughout this project, Rapoport questioned the inherent assumptions of the scientific method and computer systems. At the same time, she embraced their capacity to provide powerful new insights into individual and social dynamics. The contradictions of her critique and acceptance were often expressed humorously through puns, sexual innuendo, and tongue-in-cheek imagery.
Isomorphic Series Surface
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1981
Surface, artist’s book (detail), 1981. Marker, colored pencil, adhesive labels, photocopy on paper, plastic spine. 8.5 x 11 inches
Isomorphic Series Surface
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1981
Surface, artist’s book (detail), 1981. Marker, colored pencil, adhesive labels, photocopy on paper, plastic spine. 8.5 x 11 inches
Phase 11: Isomorphic Series Chelate: Chemical Process for Art Analysis
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1981 Artist’s book Artist's book (detail). Photocopy on acetate and paper, bound with metal,17-¼ x 11-½ inches
Isomorphic Series Chelate
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1981
Artist's book (detail). Colored pencil on photocopy
Isomorphic Series A Calculation of The Remainder
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1981 Artist’s book
Artist's book (detail). Photocopy, collage, colored type, colored pencil, pencil on continuous-feed computer paper, 15 x 88 inches
Phase 12: The Transitive Property of Equality
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2015 Collage and interactive installation Krowswork, Oakland Rapoport created The Transitive Property of Equality (2015) during her residency at Krowswork. It was installed posthumously according to her instructions. In this final work of her 65-year career, Rapoport completed the Objects on My Dresser series, which began in 1979. Rapoport used the original 28 objects for the installation and returned to her practice of collaboration, in this case with co-resident and poet Anne Lesley Selcer. Here, Rapoport collaged phrases from Selcer's 2014 poem The Natural World, onto image-rich advertising pages from The New York Times. The assemblage of newspaper ads, poem excerpts, and Rapoport's objects created synergistic relationships and inspired new readings. Additionally, viewers were invited to participate in a matching game, recording their own responses to the work by placing colorful beads in a grid. Three decades later, in the final phase of the project, Rapoport encapsulated the principles she developed in the late 1970s-early 1980s: self-analysis, collaboration, playfulness, inviting the audience to share her inquiry, and juxtaposing objects, words, and images to spark new knowledge.
Installation view. Krowswork, Oakland, CA
Transitive Property of Equality
2015
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Installation view: Krowswork, Oakland, CA; pen and pencil on paper collaged to printed newsprint mounted on acid-free mounting board, 22 x 11.5 inches
Transitive Property of Equality
2015
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