Bellagio Residency: August 2006
Project: music compositions, “Double Quartet” and a solo cello suite
Paul Rucker is an artist and composer whose work seamlessly blends visual art, music, and social justice to create profound cultural commentaries. His unique style, characterized by the use of multiple metronomic markings and layered meters, challenges conventional boundaries. During his residency at Bellagio, he focused on completing a six-movement, 40-minute composition that explores these complex rhythmic structures. Currently, Rucker is recognized not only for his powerful performances but also as a Guggenheim Fellow, Creative Capital Award recipient, as well as significant support from Mellon and Aert for Justice Fund and The Ford Foundation.
He is also the Founding and Executive Director of Cary Forward Museum opening in 2025.
This museum project will focus on correcting false narratives and coordinated exclusion in our shared histories. With over 50,000 artifacts, Rucker continues to combine art and history as well as artifacts to tell stories that help support imagining an equitable future.
Featured Talk: TED Salon
Paul Rucker is a visual artist, composer and musician who combines live performance, sound, original compositions and visual arts. The product of a rich interactive process, his work investigates community impacts, human rights issues, historical research and basic human emotions of a particular subject matter. Much of his work focuses on the prison industrial complex and the many issues accompanying incarceration in its relationship to slavery. He has presented performances and visual art exhibitions across the country, including in schools, active prisons and inactive prisons like Alcatraz.
Rucker’s installation REWIND garnered much praise and acclaim, including “Best Artist 2015” from Baltimore Magazine, “Best Solo Show 2015” and “#1 Art Show of 2015” from Baltimore City Paper, reviews by the Huffington Post, Artnet News, Washington Post, The Root and The Real News Network. He has received numerous grants, awards and residencies for visual art and music. He is a 2012 Creative Capital Grantee in visual art as well as a 2014, 2018, 2019 MAP (Multi-Arts Production) Fund Grantee for performance. In 2015, he received a prestigious Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant as well as the Mary Sawyer Baker Award. In 2016, he received the Rauschenberg Artist as Activist fellowship and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, for which he is the first artist in residence at the new National Museum of African American Culture.
Rucker’s residencies include MacDowell Colony, Blue Mountain Center, Ucross Foundation, Art OMI, Banff Center, Pilchuck Glass School, Rauschenberg Residency, Joan Mitchell Residency, Loghave, Montalvo, Hermitage, Hemera Artist Retreat, Air Serembe, Creative Alliance and the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center in Bellagio, Italy. He will be a master teacher at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in 2025. In 2013-2015, he was the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation Artist in Residence and research fellow at the Maryland Institute College of Art. He has been awarded a 2018 TED Fellowship, a 2020 TED Senior Fellowship and the 2018 Arts Innovator Award from the Dale and Leslie Chihuly Foundation and Artist Trust. He has received support from Ford/Art for Justice Fund for 2000 and 2022, and the Mellon Foundation for 2022.
Rucker is an iCubed arts research fellow and assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, and curator for creative collaboration for VCUarts. He is also the founding and executive director of Cary Forward Museum in Richmond, VA.