Paul Rucker

Paul Rucker is a visual artist, composer, musician, and historian who often combines media, integrating live performance, sound, video, animation, original compositions, storytelling, and visual art. His work is the product of a rich interactive process, through which he investigates community impact, human rights issues, historical research, and basic human emotions surrounding particular subject matter. Much of his current work focuses on dismantling inequity in order to create positive change. Rucker is a 2012 Creative Capital awardee in visual art, a 2015 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant recipient, a 2016 Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellow, a 2016 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow (for which he is the first artist in residence at the new National Museum of African American Culture), a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2018 TED Fellow. He has had residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Headlands, Blue Mountain Center, Ucross, Art OMI, Banff Centre, Pilchuck Glass School, Rauschenberg, Joan Mitchell, Hemera Artist Retreat, Air Serembe, and the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center in Bellagio, Italy. He is currently an Assistant Professor and iCube Fellow at Virginia Commonwealth University.