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.
TED Fellow: Symbols of systemic racism — and how to take away their power
Multidisciplinary artist and TED Fellow Paul Rucker is unstitching the legacy of systemic racism in the United States. A collector of artifacts connected to the history of slavery — from branding irons and shackles to postcards depicting lynchings — Rucker couldn’t find an undamaged Ku Klux Klan robe for his collection, so he began making his own. The result: striking garments in non-traditional fabrics like kente cloth, camouflage and silk that confront the normalization of systemic racism in the US. “If we as a people collectively look at these objects and realize that they are part of our history, we can find a way to where they have no more power over us,” Rucker says.
TED Fellow: How my mom inspired my approach to the cello
Multidisciplinary artist and TED Fellow Paul Rucker has developed his own style of cello; he puts chopsticks between his strings, uses the instrument as a drum and experiments with electronics like loop pedals. Moving between reflective storytelling and performance, Rucker shares his inspiration — and definitely doesn’t play the same old Bach.