Spaces of Life: The Art of Sonya Rapoport
January 18 - March 11, 2012
Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, CA
Curated by Terri Cohn and Anuradha Vikram
PUBLIC PROGRAMS:
Opening Reception & Curators’ Walk-Through
Wednesday, January 18, 2012, 6–8 PM
Objects on My Dresser: Artist Talk and Performance
Sunday, February 12, 2012, 1–3 PM
With Sonya Rapoport, Dr. Revathi Vikram, Psychiatrist, and audience members
Pre-Release Book Launch
Pairing of Polarities: The Life and Art of Sonya Rapoport, edited by Terri Cohn
Wednesday, March 7, 2012, 7 PM
With Malcolm Margolin of Heyday Press
“The art of Sonya Rapoport has long operated as a bridge between the public sphere of intellectual curiosity and scholarship, and the domestic one of spiritual inquiry and nurturing. Spaces of Life presents a group of Rapoport’s interactive works, created between 1978–2010 that function in the intersection between questioning and inviting.”
Installation View: Spaces of Life: The Art of Sonya Rapoport at Mills College Art Museum, 2012, featuring Objects On My Dresser (1979-1983)
The major retrospective exhibition Spaces of Life: The Art of Sonya Rapoport is part of Cohn’s career-defining engagement with this increasingly recognized artist, which to that point had included curating a major retrospective exhibition, Pairing of Polarities at KALA Art Institute in Berkeley in 2011,and editing the book Pairing of Polarities: The Life and Art of Sonya Rapoport (Heyday, 2012) , a collection of twelve essays by art historians and scholars, including a comprehensive biographical introduction by Cohn.
Informed by a close and productive personal relationship with Rapoport, Cohn would go on to play a critically important role in advising her estate after her death in 2015, and would publish three catalogs Yes or No? (Mills College Art Museum, 2016), Biorhythm (San José Museum of Art, 2020), and Objects On My Dresser (Sonya Rapoport Legacy Trust and KALA Art Institute, 2022), among many other publications and public engagements that addressed Rapoport’s work.
In co-curating Spaces of Life, with Anuradha Vikram, Cohn brought her deep understanding of Rapoport’s extensive body of work to the process of presenting a career-defining retrospective for this prolific and underrecognized artist. They advanced the idea that Rapoport’s work explored the interface between systems of information and domestic spaces:
“In Spaces of Life, Rapoport applies interactive processes and systems of analysis to objects and experiences emanating from her domestic life-inserting herself into those systems and inviting others to join her in participation. Her early works subjected everyday domestic forms, such as the doors of her house or objects on her dresser, to rigorous analysis, while the recent conceptual portrait series of her nuclear family considers the Cold War through a personal lens. Rapoport consistently makes analogies between the actual spaces and details of her home and her own psycho- emotional and intellectual spaces, as well as places of significance from her past, connected to her husband, children and grandchildren.”
Terri Cohn’s work in co-curating Spaces of Life: The Art of Sonya Rapoport was a crucial contribution to the growing recognition of Rapoport’s extensive and multifaceted career. By carefully selecting and contextualizing the artworks from various phases of Rapoport’s practice—spanning over 60 years—Cohn ensured that the exhibition highlighted not just individual pieces but the broader thematic and conceptual threads that defined Rapoport’s work. Her approach extended beyond the physical curation to encompass the intellectual framing of the exhibition, emphasizing the ways in which Rapoport’s systems-based, interactive processes resonated within art historical and contemporary contexts.
Through her ongoing scholarship and active promotion of Rapoport’s legacy—via exhibitions, publications, and the artist’s estate—Cohn has played an instrumental role in facilitating wider critical and scholarly engagement with Rapoport’s contributions to Conceptual and Feminist art, ensuring that her work continues to gain the recognition it deserves.