Deborah Oropallo (b. Hackensack, New Jersey) received a BFA from Alfred University and an MA/MFA from the University of California at Berkeley. Originally trained as a painter, Oropallo incorporates mixed media techniques, including photomontage, video, computer editing, printmaking, and painting into her practice. Whether still or moving images, the resulting works bear traces of the distortions that evolve or remain from the image manipulation. Her composite works layer visual sources producing dense interplay between time, place, form, and content. She has collaborated on video works with Andy Rappaport since 2017.

Her exhibition history includes monographic exhibits at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California, the Boise Art Museum, Idaho, Montalvo Art Center, Saratoga, California, the San Jose Museum of Art, California; and work in exhibits at the Whitney American Art Museum (Whitney Biennial), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, and The Jewish Museum, New York, New York. Oropallo’s work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York, and the Anderson Collection at Stanford University, California.

Andy Rappaport was born in New York, New York in 1957 and has had a nearly 50-year long involvement with music, sound, photography, and technology. 

Rappaport’s collaboration with Oropallo on the video works for Dark Landscapes for a White House (2018) marked his first foray into music for moving images since scoring student films in the 1970s and draws on his experiences at that time with some of the earliest commercially available music synthesizers. In 2024, Oropallo’s survey exhibition at the Schneider Museum of Art in Ashland, Oregon will also include collaborative projects with Rappaport, and a monographic catalog.

SELECT Exhibitions

• FLOOD, Bioneers Conference, Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco, California, 2022

• Mapping the Sublime: Reframing Landscape in the 21st Century, The Brand Library & Art Center, Los Angeles, California, 2022

• UPRISING, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, California, 2021

• Monuments, Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco, California, 2021

• Prototypes, Converge 45, Portland, Oregon

• Migrating Bodies, Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland, Oregon

• FLIGHT, Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara, California 2019

• FLIGHT, Special Presentation, Untitled Art Basel, Miami, FL, 2019

• Dark Landscapes for a White House, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, California, 2018

• Apocalypse, Hanson Howard Gallery, Ashland, Oregon, 2018

• Bell the Cat, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, California, 2017

• Hippie Modernism: Counterculture, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, California, 2017

CollectionS

• Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC, 2022

• The Kramlich Collection, Napa, California, 2022

• 21c Museum Hotels, Louisville, KY, 2020

• Segre Collection USA/London, 2020

• Lorna Meyer Calas and Dennis Calas Collection, San Francisco, California, 2018

• The Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, Nevada, 2017

• Museum and Pacific Film Archive UC Berkeley, California, 2017