About the Artist

Paul Rucker is a multimedia visual artist, composer, and musician. His practice often integrates live performance, original musical compositions, and visual art installations. For nearly two decades, Rucker has used his own brand of art-making as a social practice, illuminating the legacy of enslavement and incarceration in America and its connection to the current sociopolitical 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 and a recipient of multiple MAP (Multi-Arts Production) Fund grants for performance. He was awarded a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2018 TED Fellowship, a 2020 TED Senior Fellowship, and a 2018 Arts Innovator Award from the Dale and Leslie Chihuly Foundation and Artist Trust in Washington State. Rucker has received support from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation 2013-present, Art for Justice Fund in 2000 and 2022, and the Mellon Foundation in 2022.

In 2015, Paul Rucker received a prestigious Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant and the Mary Sawyers Baker Award. In 2016, he received the Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, becoming the first artist-in-residence at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Rucker ’ s artist residencies include the renowned MacDowell colony, Blue Mountain Center, Ucross Foundation, Art Omi, Banff Centre, Pilchuck Glass School, Rauschenberg Residency, Joan Mitchell Center, Loghaven, Hermitage Artist Retreat, Hemera, AIR Serenbe, Creative Alliance, and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Italy.

Rucker is a Convergence Lab Research Fellow and assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, as well as curator for creative collaboration at VCUarts.