Biography
Sonya Rapoport (1923–2015) was a pioneering conceptual and feminist artist whose career spanned modernist painting, computer art in the era of mainframe systems, and interactive new media work. The first woman to receive an MA in Fine Art from UC Berkeley in 1949, she began her career as an Abstract Expressionist painter and received a solo exhibition at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in 1963. She then developed a feminist pattern language, working with stencils on printed fabrics, survey charts, and, beginning in 1976, discarded computer printout paper. She was soon tabulating personal information about her house, shoes, biological cycles, etc.–what she termed “soft material”–and using code to create illustrated, autobiographical data visualizations. In the early 1980s, she hosted computer-mediated interactive exhibitions that collected and processed subjective data from viewers–her “audience participation performances.” She was active in early online communities and created software publishing projects and web art. Through a research-based practice rooted in collaboration with scientists and tempered by wit and humor, she explored “the quantification of qualitative information.”
Rapoport’s work has been presented in more than 70 solo exhibitions and numerous group shows internationally. She published 14 artist books and was the subject of retrospective exhibitions at KALA Art Institute (2011), Mills College Art Museum (2012), and the Fresno Art Museum (2013), as well as the essay collection Pairing of Polarities (Heyday, 2012; ed. Terri Cohn). Since her death, renewed scholarship has emerged through catalogs such as Yes or No? (2015), Biorhythm (2020), and Objects On My Dresser (2022), all by Alla Efimova and Terri Cohn. Her work has been featured in major exhibitions about early computer art, including Radical Software (MUDAM, 2024 & Kunsthalle Wien, 2025), Digital Capture (UCR ARTS, 2024), Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age (LACMA, 2023), Biorhythm (San José Museum of Art, 2020), The Computer Pays Its Debt (Center for Craft, 2020), Refiguring the Future (Hunter College, 2018), Chance and Control (Victoria and Albert Museum, 2018), and Imaging by Numbers (Block Museum of Art, 2008). Her archives are available at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. The Sonya Rapoport Legacy Trust was established in 2015 to steward her estate, foster research, and maintain a living archive to contextualize her work. She is represented by Casemore Gallery, San Francisco.
About the Trust
The Sonya Rapoport Legacy Trust was established by artist Sonya Rapoport during her lifetime to steward her art estate, to preserve and contextualize the history of her studio art practice through a living archive, and to expand the cultural legacy of her work.
We maintain a collection of Rapoport’s art objects dating from the 1940s through 2015, including definitive collections of her computer-mediated interactive installations. We seek to expand the recognition of Rapoport’s practice by placing her artworks at appropriate institutions and with private collectors. We work with curators to plan exhibitions, and arrange artwork loans and copyright permissions. Interested parties are encouraged to view the collection by appointment.
A primary mission of the SRLT is to encourage scholarship & research. Available on this website are images of artworks, a brief history of Rapoport’s career, and primary source research materials.
The Sonya Rapoport Legacy Trust is directed by Farley Gwazda, who worked with Sonya Rapoport as an artists’ assistant during her lifetime, prepared her papers to be archived at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, completed the process of inventorying and preserving her work after her death, and has had the pleasure of working with curators, gallerists, and scholars on exhibitions and publications of Rapoport’s artwork. He loves to speak with anyone who is interested in Sonya Rapoport!
Partners
The Sonya Rapoport Legacy Trust has partnered with art advisors and historians Terri Cohn of Terri Cohn Art Services, and Alla Efimova, of KunstWorks.
We have worked extensively with Julie Casemore at Casemore Gallery in San Francisco, which currently represents a selection of Rapoport’s artworks.
The Sonya Rapoport Legacy Trust would like to express our deep gratitude to Sonya Rapoport’s daughter, Hava Fereres-Rapoport, without whose support none of our work would have been possible.
Land Acknowledgement
The Sonya Rapoport Legacy Trust is based in Berkeley, California, which sits on the territory of xučyun (Huichin), the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo speaking Ohlone people, the successors of the sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. We recognize that every member of our community has, and continues to benefit from, the use and occupation of this land.
Do you possess artwork by Sonya Rapoport that we might not be aware of? We would love to hear from you in order to place the work in its historical context: