Sonya Rapoport at Art Basel Miami Beach
December 4 — December 8, 2024
The Sonya Rapoport Legacy Trust is partnering with Casemore Gallery to participate in Art Basel Miami Beach in the Survey Sector, Booth S6, with a solo presentation by the groundbreaking artist, Sonya Rapoport (1923 - 2015). Five significant works from Rapoport's 1976 series Yarn Drawings will be presented.
Emerging first as an abstract expressionist painter, The Yarn Drawings marked a significant turning point for Rapoport, opening conceptual possibilities that changed the trajectory of her work, until her death in 2015 at age 92. During the era of punch cards and room-sized “mainframe” computers, Rapoport chanced upon continuous-feed computer paper in a trash can in the basement of the UC Berkeley mathematics building. Drawn to the then-futuristic aesthetic of sprocket holes, grid lines, and cryptic inscriptions, Rapoport drew into the existing patterns with graphite, colored pencil, and ink stamps, and used colorful yarn to stitch the pages together.
The Yarn Drawings featured a set of stencils of feminist symbols Rapoport called her Nü-Shu language (after a script exclusively used by women in Hunan, China) that she’d used in paintings throughout the 1970s. In these new drawings on computer paper, overlapping chains of X chromosomes and vulva forms—tracings of a plastic uterus from an anatomy kit—frame the underlying dot matrix printed graphs. Rapoport’s interest in the computer printouts was initially aesthetic; she was excited by their appearance and material presence, using the blocky printed data to structure her compositions. However, her interest quickly evolved into using code as an artmaking tool, gathering data about what she called “soft material” - her shoe collection, her nostalgic keepsakes, the ups and downs of her daily emotional state.
Sonya Rapoport's Yarn Drawings represent early, yet astonishingly realized examples of how computer coding and its related materials could be adapted for art-making, while the work itself presaged the transformative role that computing would play in our everyday lives.
Private Days:
Wednesday, December 4, 11am–7pm ET
Thursday, December 5, 11am–7pm ET
Public Days:
Friday, December 6, 11am–6pm ET
Saturday, December 7, 11am–6pm ET
Sunday, December 8, 11am–6pm ET
Booth #S6
Miami Beach Convention Center
1901 Convention Center Drive
Miami Beach, FL 33139
Casemore Gallery
1275 Minnesota Street #102
San Francisco, CA 94107
415 851 9808
www.casemoregallery.com
info@casemoregallery.com