“The truth that lies at the conception of an image can change dramatically, subliminally, even unrecognizably during and after the completion of the work. How can art not be catharsis?”
April Rapier received her MFA, summa cum laude, from Rhode Island School of Design in 1979. She was President’s Fellowship recipient at RISD in 1977. Upon graduating, Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan, two of her professors, set up appointments with galleries around the country, and a career was launched.
“I’m grateful that I was a gypsy in my younger days, living and working in Europe, Hawaii, New England, Colorado, Mexico and Central America – traveling extensively, and finally returning to Texas. I spent many years as a fine art and commercial photographer in Houston, bridging the gap between two seemingly disparate disciplines. I have taught at the university level, which informs my work significantly; to teach is to understand what motivates. The past few years have been spent writing, photographing, working in mixed media – recharging and focusing on what I love best about what I do. The Hill Country is now my home, and I am again wandering with my band, Sugar Bayou.”
Rapier’s photographs are on the world’s finest walls, from museums to private and corporate collections: National Portrait Gallery, London; Smithsonian, Washington, DC; Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; Boston MFA; Museum of Fine Arts and Memorial Hermann Hospital System, Houston; Whitney Museum of American Art, George Eastman House and Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Art; Los Angeles Contemporary Art Museum; Yale University; Rhode Island Museum; University of Texas Austin; Center For Creative Photography, University of Arizona; Art Institute, Chicago; Gilman Paper Company Collection, Elton John Collection, Graham Nash Collection and Bill and Alice Wright Collection (complete list below). A partial list of clients includes Chevron, Cameron Iron, IBM, Polaroid, 3M, Kodak, Sysco Foods, Bergdorf Goodman, Park Plaza Hospital, Texas Monthly, Atlantic Monthly, Houston Chronicle, Boston Globe, Washington Post and London Times. She has served on the boards of numerous organizations, among them The Society For Photographic Education, The Texas Photographic Society and The Houston Center For Photography, and has been a member of The American Society of Magazine Photographers for twenty-five years. She is a highly sought-after and extensively published photojournalist, grant and award recipient.
“Making pictures is like leaving remnants of oneself wherever one goes – a wish granted, a desire fulfilled. Parallel truths exist between photographer and subject, between photographer and viewer. So many things happen within the course of a day, a lifetime, many of which are forgettable moments. But some of us are born with a lucky streak – or maybe we’re just afraid to let go of anything lest it be diminished in memory. So we resist change by taking pictures, make art out of them, show or store them, and the real luck emerges when anyone who sees them takes a similarly useful experience away. Rather than lead the witness, I prefer not to offer too much by way of explanation of my work. It might taint the viewer’s truth, and it might undermine my own.”
– Artist’s statement from the exhibition Texas Photographers, Alice and Bill Wright Collection, The Grace Museum, Abilene, 2009.
April Rapier continues to be influential in art and education. She recently co-authored, with curator Roy Flukinger, the forward for a book about gallery owner and collector John Cleary, and wrote about technology’s influence on the medium for the Fall 2012 issue of Spot Magazine (a publication of the Houston Center for Photography). She has curated countless exhibitions for museums and galleries in the US and Europe, including Eve Arnold’s life retrospective for International Center for Photography, New York and the National Portrait Gallery, London. In addition to having taught at universities around the country, she has been a private art instructor throughout her career, creating and inspiring generations of photographers and maintaining and renewing interest in the traditions of the medium. She and Flukinger, curator at the University of Texas Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, are writing a book about photographer Bart Parker and curating his life retrospective exhibition.
“I have born witness to the extraordinary and absurd, the arcane, the indifferent, history in the making and after the fact, moments which are a privilege as well as a heartbreak to record. Naked, newborn, death, chaos, beauty, meaningless hatred, boundless love, senseless opulence – experienced, revisited, held close as tangible memory, talisman or cautionary tale.”
