For Immediate Release September 6, 2005

For More Information Contact: Anita Day, 317-278-9475 Julie Schaefer, 317-278-9477

Rauschenberg Opens Exhibit at Herron School of Art and Design

INDIANAPOLIS - An exhibition of new works titled Scenarios and Short Stories by American Master Robert Rauschenberg will open at the Herron Galleries at Herron School of Art and Design on Friday, September 9 from 5:00-8:00pm. Collaborative works created by Rauschenberg and fellow artist, Darryl Pottorf, and the photography of Christopher Rauschenberg, son of Robert Rauschenberg, will complement the exhibit. A lecture by Art Critic Donald Kuspit on Tuesday, September 13 at 7:00pm will focus on Rauschenberg's work.

For more than five decades, Robert Rauschenberg has worked with unrelenting energy, inventiveness, and curiosity to create works of unparalleled depth and breadth. His fusion of imagery and objects has blurred the boundaries between traditional art-making genres and methods, redefining conventional notions of painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking and performance, and distinguishing him as one of the most innovative artists of the 20 th century. He defined the landscape of art for the second half of the 20 th century. His visual fields of appropriated media images, tossed together helter-skelter, taught a generation how to process experience in an information age. His own color travel photos became the main image pool transferred by increasingly complex means to a variety of surfaces. The works included in this exhibition reflect Rauschenberg's unmistakable collage-based style and distinctive repertoire of images.

"There's a poetic innocence to Rauschenberg's Scenarios and Short Stories," says one of America's most distinguished art critics, Donald Kuspit, scheduled to speak at Herron on September 13 at 7:00pm. "They're prose poems with a strong Symbolist undertone." Kuspit suggests that Rauschenberg's visual objects are coded entries in a private diary, with personal and transcendental meaningfulness. Kuspit says, "Rauschenberg is in effect free associating, then arranging the associations to form a meaningful pattern."

Darryl Pottorf and Christopher Rauschenberg will be showing recent works with Robert Rauschenberg. Characterized as members of the School of Rauschenberg by Donald Kuspit, each of these artists is original in his own right. Pottorf, once Rauschenberg's assistant and collaborator, creates photography-based multimedia works that are expansive and more thematically concentrated. Christopher Rauschenberg, preeminent Oregon photographer and Robert's son, presents a series of images recently captured in Europe and South America. He shoots the images sequentially and then mounts them in a disjunctive line, representing an aesthetic transcendence over a sometimes devastating reality.

The Herron Galleries are located at Herron School of Art and Design on the campus of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Gallery hours are 11:00am - 5:00pm daily, open Thursday until 7:00pm. Admission is free for both the exhibition and the lecture. The exhibition will remain open through October 9. For additional information, please call the Herron Galleries at (317) 278-9418. ###