Sonya Rapoport’s artwork is featured in the exhibition Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952 – 1982 at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, open through July 2, 2023.
Sonya Rapoport, Shoe-Field Map, Tile, and documents (1982-86) in “Coded…” at LACMA, 2023.
This high-profile exhibition has received extensive coverage in the media, bringing Rapoport’s artwork to new audiences and expanding the conversation about the early development of computer art.
Although Sonya’s work is hard to spot in the above feature on PBS Newshour’s Canvas series, they present the work in the exhibition as related to contemporary cultural concerns. For a more detailed walkthrough, see this video from VernissageTV,
The Brooklyn Rail offers an expansive analysis of the show in the context of the history of computer art:
I’ll Be Your Mirror and Coded offer metaphor and history to guide us through the making of our present and inform our understanding of what next. They present artists whose works designate technologies as imbricated in social mores and so the rampant anxieties we have about malignant machines seem likely to be fantasy projections of longstanding social systems that don’t work.
Kent, Charlotte, Past and Present for a Creative Future, The Brooklyn Rail, March 2023
Additional articles appear in the Financial Times, HypeBeast, artnet.com, K011, and The Art Newspaper, among others, many of which feature images of Rapoport’s work. A common feature of these articles is a focus on recent developments in digital art, namely NFTs and AI art created with generative neural networks.
For those wondering about how an exhibition like this comes together, engaging interviews with curator Leslie Jones appear in Right Click Save. ARTnews, and studio international.
Sonya Rapoport, Anasazi Series, (1977) installed in Coded… at LACMA, 2023.
Finally, we have put together a feature article about the Anasazi Series drawing (1977) featured in Coded… and many of the above articles, exploring this paradigmatic work and the development of Rapoport’s career.
Don’t miss Sonya Rapoport’s early computer art and works on paper in the exhibition Force Fields at Julie Casemore Gallery, San Francisco, April 1 – May 13, 2023.