Miami Art Museum Presents Focus Gallery: Robert Rauschenberg
Exhibition Preview and Public Lecture
Thursday, November 19, 2010, 6-9pm
Roni Feinstein, author, critic, and curator of the 1990 exhibition Robert Rauschenberg: The Silkscreen Paintings 1962-1964 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Feinstein has been a frequent contributor to Art in America, and is currently an instructor of Academic Courses at The Museum of Modern Art and Adjunct Instructor at the NYU School of Continuing and Professional Studies.
Information/RSVP: events@miamiartmuseum.org.

November 19, 2010 – April 10, 2011 Miami Art Museum will present a new exhibition in the Focus Gallery section of its Permanent Collection installation, dedicated to works by the late Robert Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg is celebrated as one of the first artists to incorporate mass media imagery into his artwork. Focus Gallery: Robert Rauschenberg, open November 19, 2010 through April 10, 2011, looks at various techniques the artist used over the course of his career to transfer images from their source medium into his artworks.

“The exhibition will underscore the creative ingenuity that characterized Rauschenberg’s career for over fifty years—the last thirty-five of which he spent based in Florida,” said Peter Boswell, MAM assistant director for programs/senior curator. “It will emphasize his seminal role in understanding the importance of the mass media to modern culture.”

The exhibition will feature a key work from MAM’s collection — Untitled, 1986 from his Copper Series — along with several works lent by the Estate of Robert Rauschenberg to examine how Rauschenberg employed different techniques at different times in his career to achieve stunningly diverse effects. Included among the loans will be a rarely seen series of solvent transfer drawings from 1965; a Hoarfrost work from 1974, made from images imprinted on thin, translucent fabric; and one of the artist’s late dye-transfer works on polylaminate, in which Rauschenberg employed images he himself had taken.

Rauschenberg began in the 1950s by collaging actual newspaper and magazine pages, postcards and book illustrations into his famous “combine” paintings, which also included a variety of found objects ranging from clothing items to stuffed animals. But as early as 1959 he began transferring images from their source medium—the printed page, for example—onto the surfaces of his artworks instead of collaging them. This switched the emphasis from image as object to image as transmitted information. Over the course of his career, he used lighter fluid, solvent, lithography, silkscreen, and water to transfer images from the media onto paper, canvas, fabric, metal and polylaminate, creating unique hybrid works of art that combine elements of drawing, printing and painting.

Focus Gallery: Robert Rauschenberg is located within BETWEEN HERE AND THERE: Modern and Contemporary Art from the Permanent Collection, the Museum’s Permanent Collection installation. Changing every four to six months, the Focus Gallery presents mini-exhibitions of artists or themes considered cornerstones of MAM’s collection and collecting goals.

Focus Gallery: Robert Rauschenberg is organized by Miami Art Museum and curated by Peter Boswell, MAM assistant director for programs/senior curator. It is supported by donations to MAM’s Annual Exhibition Fund. Additional support provided by Marvin Ross Friedman and Adrienne Bon Haes.

Miami Art Museum, a modern and contemporary art museum located in downtown Miami, FL, is dedicated to collecting and exhibiting international art of the 20th and 21st centuries with an emphasis on the cultures of the Atlantic Rim—the Americas, Europe and Africa—from which the vast majority of Miami residents hail. Recently, Miami Art Museum has presented exhibitions of works by Janet Cardiff and George Buress Miller, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Quisqueya Henriquez, Guillermo Kuitca, Wifredo Lam, Susan Rothenberg (November 2010) and Yinka Shonibare, and its Permanent Collection includes works by Doug Aitken, José Bedia, Mark Dion, Marcel Duchamp, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Ann Hamilton, Arturo Herrera, Alfredo Jaar, Sol LeWitt, Vik Muniz, Wangechi Mutu, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, James Rosenquist, Tomas Saraceno, Lorna Simpson and Rachel Whiteread. Miami Art Museum’s educational programming currently reaches more than 30,000 people every year, with the largest art education program outside the Miami-Dade County public school system. The new Miami Art Museum at Museum Park, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, is scheduled to open to the public in 2013. The new facility will provide room to showcase growing collections, expanded exhibition space to bring more world-class exhibitions to Miami-Dade County, and an educational complex, which will be a resource for the entire community. For more information about Miami Art Museum, visit miamiartmuseum.org or call 305.375.3000.