Artist Talk: Paul Rucker

Join artist Paul Rucker for a discussion of his multidisciplinary practice as a visual artist, composer, and musician. He combines media, live performance, sound, original compositions, and visual art to explore issues related to mass incarceration, racially motivated violence, and the continued impact of policies that sustain inequity. To describe the video installation Proliferation (pictured left), which VMFA acquired in 2018, Rucker states, “Art can tell stories. For years I would talk about injustice by reciting numbers and statistics. When you say, ‘we have over 2.3 million people in prison,’ it’s too large a number to comprehend. During a residence around prison issues at the Blue Mountain Center in New York, I found some maps that I felt could help tell the story. This project shows the proliferation of the US prison system from a celestial point of view. Using different colors to indicate different eras, the viewer can clearly see the astonishing growth of this system over time.” Rucker was recently announced as a Ted Fellow and featured on PBS NewsHour.