The Sonya Rapoport Legacy Trust is pleased to announce the publication of “Sonya Rapoport: Objects On My Dresser,” an 86-page book that offers a comprehensive exploration of Sonya Rapoport’s most ambitious project – by Alla Efimova and Terri Cohn.

Objects on My Dresser (1979-83, 2015) is conceptual artist Sonya Rapoport’s psychological self-portrait for the digital age. Motivated by the recent passing of her mother, she joined together with a psychologist in a project that was part therapy, part creative collaboration. During the psychoanalytic process, Rapoport selected 28 objects that had accumulated on her bedroom dresser, ranging from travel souvenirs to family photos, small curios, and other keepsakes, which became anchors for the analysis. Rapoport turned to a newly available tool—the computer—and used the data mined from psychoanalysis to code, plot, and graph her interior experience. With exclusive access to archival materials and interviews with the artist during her lifetime, Efimova and Cohn decode Objects on My Dresser and position it in the canons of Conceptual, Feminist, and early computer art.

The book is co-published by the Sonya Rapoport Legacy Trust and Kala Art Institute and funded, in part, by the Jay DeFeo Foundation. Design by Atelier Pickard.

Book Launch Events

We celebrated the launch of the book at Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco on September 27th, 2022. An event at Kala Art Institute, Berkeley had to be cancelled due to health concerns.

We have shared a series of images and stories about Objects on My Dresser on our Instagram account @sonya.rapoport!

If you’ve read the book and have a moment, it would help us get the book to a larger audience if you could write an honest review on Amazon. Thank you!