At the invitation of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Robert Rauschenberg: Real Time is part of the centennial celebration of the birth of Robert Rauschenberg. Hosted in South Florida, Rauschenberg’s home state from 1970 to his death in 2008, the exhibition is funded by the artist’s Foundation as part of this global museum initiative.

The exhibition draws from the museum’s extensive holdings of experimental prints from the 1970s, created by Rauschenberg in collaboration with Graphicstudio at The USF Institute for Research in Art in Tampa, Florida. Diverting from his established methods of image replication, these works saw the artist flatten and sequence appropriated imagery onto textiles and paper surfaces using lithography, screen printing, offset, and single-use solvent transfers.

Rauschenberg’s collaged scrims are presented alongside found objects, which the artist referred to as “actual elements of everyday life,” further seating these images in the real. The works are made to navigate the everyday conditions of light, air, and the physical presence of viewers in the gallery space. Rauschenberg breathed new life into the historic medium of printmaking through these challenges to the technology of reproduction and modes of perception.