
The Sonya Rapoport Legacy Trust is pleased to announce that the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) has added to their permanent collection two beautiful, large acrylic paintings – No. 20 II (1973, pictured above), and Evolvement, (1974) – as well as the drawing Survey Chart No. 20 (1971, pictured below).

These works all feature Rapoport’s “Nu-Shu” stencil language of feminine symbols, which she used in all of her work from this period – beginning with her chance discovery in 1971 of a collection of antique survey charts squirreled away in a second-hand desk, and culminating in 1976 in the the last paintings of her career.
Nushu is a script used exclusively by women in Hunan, China – a fitting inspiration for the first of many sets of enigmatic symbols that Rapoport would explore in drawings, computer art, and interactive installations throughout her later career.
