Paul Rucker
Paul Rucker is a visual artist, composer, and musician who often combines various types of media, integrating live performance, sound, original compositions, and visual art. Much of his current work focuses on the Prison Industrial Complex and the many issues accompanying incarceration in its relationship to slavery.
TRAILS OF VAPOR
A collection of sounds representing milestone events in the history of aviation, space exploration, and popular aviation-themed music broadcasted by speakers strategically placed along the length of the T. Evans Wyckoff Memorial bridge.
For nearly two decades, Rucker has used his own brand of art making as a social practice, which illuminates the legacy of enslavement in America and its relationship to the current socio-political moment. His work is the product of a rich interactive process, through which he investigates community impacts, human rights issues, historical research, and basic human emotions.
Rucker has received numerous grants, awards and residencies for visual art and music. He is a 2012 Creative Capital Grantee in visual art as well as a 2014, 2018, 2019 MAP (Multi-Arts Production) Fund Grantee for performance. In 2015 he received a prestigious Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant as well as the Mary Sawyer Baker Award. In 2016 Paul received the Rauschenberg Artist as Activist fellowship and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, for which he is the first artist in residence at the new National Museum of African American Culture.