The Sonya Rapoport Legacy Trust is pleased to share a review, Art as a Social System, or Feminism Enters the Computer Age, published in the final issue of long-running, Los Angeles-based contemporary art journal X–TRA.
This is an especially meaningful connection for the Trust, as the review was written by Anuradha Vikram, co-curator with Terri Cohn of Sonya Rapoport’s retrospective exhibitions at Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, and KALA Art Institute, Berkeley, both in 2012, and author of Decolonizing Culture (Sming Sming Books, 2017).
The review examines the 2023 exhibition Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982 at LACMA, which featured several computer artworks on paper by Sonya Rapoport. Vikram critiques the curatorial framework, highlighting the underrepresentation of women and non-Western artists in favor of the usual Modern Art suspects. They provide valuable historical context for three women who were included—Sonya Rapoport, Beryl Korot, and Barbara T. Smith—emphasizing the human element that is often overlooked in art and technology exhibitions.
Sonya Rapoport, Anasazi Series, Folio II, detail: page 5 of 15, 1977. Prismacolor, graphite, colored type, and dot-matrix print on computer printout paper, 15 x 165 in. Collection of Los Angeles County Museum of Art. © Estate of Sonya Rapoport.
“Many works on view in Coded infuse systems logic with an element of contemporary critical thought, which means deemphasizing imagery created by designers and researchers in favor of experiments in computing as artmaking undertaken by trained and established visual artists. Rather than acquiesce to the hardware fetishism that characterizes the exhibition’s introductory gallery or the aesthetics of mass reproduction that conditioned graphic design during this period, I am looking for the personal, the interpretive, and the affective—the human element that is retained even when the artwork is made using automated systems. These characteristics are distinctly apparent in the embodied technological practices of artists in the exhibition who are women, particularly the work of Sonya Rapoport, Beryl Korot, and Barbara T. Smith.”
–Anuradha Vikram, Art as a Social System, or Feminism Enters the Computer Age, X–TRA, Spring 2024