Mat Rappaport

Biography

Mat Rappaport’s is a Chicago based artist, curator and educator. Rappaport’s art work has been exhibited in the United States and internationally in museums, galleries, film festivals and public spaces including the United Kingdom, Italy and the former Yugoslavia. His current work utilizes mobile video, performance and photography to explore habitation, perception and power as related to built environments. Recent projects have been featured in the events marking the 500 Anniversary of the Jewish Ghetto in Venice, Italy, the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial and the 2017 and 2018 Ann Arbor Film Festival Off The Screen programs.

Rappaport is a co-initiator of V1B3 [www.v1b3.com], which seeks to shape the experience of urban environments through media based interventions. Beginning in 2005, Rappaport and v1b3, began a series of large scale video art programs through a partnership with the Bigger Screen in Manchester, UK; a 25 square meter public video screen co-run by the BBC. Later curated projects were presented in Liverpool and London, Singapore, and Melbourne, Australia. In 2011 v1b3 received a Propeller Grant, with the collective Unreal Estates, for an exhibition of public augmented reality work which was placed in downtown Chicago. More recently, v1b3 has partnered with the College Art Association to curate and produce a series of exhibitions and catalogs which explore how artists are critically integrating new technologies into their practices. These projects included drones, augmented reality and computational video. v1b3 has continued to curate video and projection-based art work including the 2018 exhibition Dissolving Sights presented at Automata Gallery in Los Angeles.

Rappaport has published essays on media art in public spaces and artists critical responses to the drone wars in the Media-N journal, the iDMAa Journal and a chapter in the book Beyond Globalization: Making New Worlds in Media, Art and Social Practices by Rutgers University Press. Rappaport’s photographic work is included in the Midwest Photographer’s Collection at the Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago and in and at the Newberry Library Protest Art Collection. He has received fellowships from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Howard Foundation, the Mary L. Nohl Fund, the Montgomery County Ohio Cultural District, and University of Wisconsin Milwaukee’s Center for 21st Century Studies. Rappaport received his MFA from the University of Notre Dame. Rappaport is an Associate Professor at Columbia College in Chicago.

Degrees

B.F.A., Studio Art Tufts University 1994
M.F.A., Art Studio University of Notre Dame 1998