In 1970, Sonya Rapoport bought a second-hand architect’s desk in which she found a collection of antique survey charts from a dam building project on the Snake River in Idaho. Using the Nu-Shu language of feminist stencils that she’d been developing since her paintings of the late 1960s, she worked directly on the found papers in boldly colored acrylic and soft, atmospheric graphite.
The Survey Chart paintings on paper continued Rapoport’s experiments with using found, pre-printed materials that she had started with her Fabric Paintings of the early 1960s. She would spend most of the 1970s exploring the ideas in these works, expanding these small drawings into monumental scale paintings, and experimenting with media such as airbrush.
