Celebrating Rauschenberg's Centennial with Merce Cunningham Trust
Merce Cunningham in Antic Meet (1958). Costume design by Robert Rauschenberg. Photo: Richard Rutledge. Courtesy of the Merce Cunningham Trust and the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library.
Celebrating Rauschenberg's Centennial with Merce Cunningham Trust
Celebrating Robert Rauschenberg's 100th birthday requires a performance event as singular and imaginative as the artist himself. With vital funding from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, The Art Gallery of Ontario, alongside the Merce Cunningham Trust, will mark this milestone by restaging excerpts from several of the two artists’ collaborative dance pieces. This program, specially created for the AGO, includes Changeling (1957), Antic Meet (1958), Story (1963), and XOVER (2007). Rauschenberg’s Combine painting titled Story (1964) forms part of the AGO’s permanent collection and is the only surviving artifact from the scenography Rauschenberg created onstage during the performance of the same name by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. It is currently on display in the Moments in Modernism exhibition at the AGO through April 26, 2026
Performers: Christian Allen, Sienna Blaw, Eve Jacobs, Justin Lynch, Lindsey Jones, with live musical accompaniment by Adam Tendler.
Background on Rauschenberg and Cunningham
An American painter and sculptor, Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) thrived on collapsing conventional artistic categories and on a lifelong commitment to working with practitioners from across disciplines, including performers, printmakers, and engineers. Among his most fruitful collaborations began in the summer of 1952 while he was a student at Black Mountain College, where he worked closely with composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham. He took part in an event organized by Cage now known as Theatre Piece No.1 (1952). Less than two years later, Rauschenberg created a freestanding object (the first of his Combines) for the Cunningham work Minutiae (1954), which also featured music by Cage. For the next ten years, Rauschenberg worked closely with the company, designing costumes, sets, and/or lighting for more than twenty dances, including Changeling (1957), Antic Meet (1958), Summerspace (1958), Story (1963), and Winterbranch (1964). In 1964, the year that he won the International Grand Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale, he traveled with the company as a lighting, set, and costume designer, and stage manager for the world tour. After a thirteen-year hiatus, Rauschenberg returned to design for Travelogue (1977), and in later years, Interscape (2000) and XOVER (2007).
This project is supported by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation
This project is supported by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation
