Throughout the 1950s Sonya Rapoport was balancing her artmaking with her obligations as a so-called “faculty wife” to Professor of Chemistry Henry Rapoport and mother of three young children. She showed her work–primarily watercolors–in group exhibitions sponsored by Bay Area art museums, gaining some recognition.
Gallerist Etya Gechtoff gave Rapoport her first solo exhibition at East & West Gallery in San Francisco in 1958. East & West was on Fillmore Street, close to where Jay DeFeo and other Beat artists were based, but Gechtoff tended to show an older generation of abstract expressionist painters. Rapoport, embedded in the academic world across the Bay, was not part of the Beat scene, although she was aware of this work through her friend, the artist Fred Martin.
Rapoport’s first solo exhibition garnered positive reviews:
Mrs. Rapoport's water colors radiate a quality of dash and verve due to the sureness of her brush stroke, and a handsome quality of luminosity due to her sensitive handling of color and black played against white paper. Her style results from the device of playing two contrasting calligraphies against each other across the picture plane. One is a sharp, hard black line made with pen or stick, the other, softer, broad bands of color made with a very sure brush. These linear interplayers weave in and out in delightful counterpoint suggesting swift, athletic movements through space.
- James McCray, Sonya Rapoport at East West Gallery, Argonaut, January 31, 1958
Rapoport in her studio in the 1950s, with son, Robert.
