Robert Rauschenberg: Real Time Celebrating the centennial of the artist's birth

Robert Rauschenberg: Real Time is part of the centennial celebration of the artist’s birth. Hosted in South Florida, the state Rauschenberg called home from late 1970 until his death in 2008, the exhibition features NSU Art Museum’s extensive holdings of experimental prints from the 1970s and his photographs from the early 1950s on loan from the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation. Also on view are films by Charles Atlas of Rauschenberg’s set and costume collaborations with choreographer Merce Cunningham.

Born in 1925, in Port Arthur, Texas, Rauschenberg moved to New York City in 1949 after studying art at North Carolina’s experimental Black Mountain College. He quickly gained a reputation as an enfant terrible, who radically eroded the boundaries between art and life with his groundbreaking Combines, which fused painting, photography and sculpture. These works confront viewers in their own space with objects taken from everyday life such as a quilt, tire, ladder and Coco-Cola bottles. Rauschenberg experimented with new technologies, collaborated with contemporary dancers and composers, and breathed new life into printmaking. His painting Rebus, 1955, boldly declared that his paintings were visual puzzles that could be “read” as well as looked at.