Artist Post: Sonya Rapoport

Art, Code, and the Engine of Change by Paul Hertz featured a number of artists as it described the interesting and arduous process by which digital media transitioned into the art world. Among the featured artists was one whose artwork caught my eye: Sonya Rapoport.

Mills College puts it succinctly: "  Sonya Rapoport is a distinguished artist whose sixty-year career spans painting, works on paper, interactive installations and digital works." Her wide range of mediums and experience make her one of the greatest artists alive today. At 89 years of age (turning 90 tomorrow, 10/06/2013), she maintains a blog which can be found here. The purpose of her blog, in her own words, is to "re-appropriate former work and to re-contextualize it into current events, topically, politically, and/or conceptually."

 Even more intriguing than the artwork entitled Shoe-field was the description of how it came about. Hertz reported "Shoefield by Sonya Rapoport represents physical and emotional data about people's shoes gathered at a 'shoe-in' in a series of graphs, including a force-field map graphing the similarity of responses as magnetic domains." One can reflect upon the significance of his or her own shoes, the journeys undertaken in them, or the memories of how they were obtained, and instantly draw deep significance. Shoefield is, in this way, far more than the mere collecting of graphed shoes; it is the expression of dozens of lives and stories.