Robert Rauschenberg & the News: Select Prints from The New School Art Collection brings together, for the first time, fifteen prints by Robert Rauschenberg held in the university’s collection. Inaugurating the installation, this panel gathers experts to speak to the artist’s multifaceted practice—Juliana Ochs Dweck, Helen Hsu, and Margaret Rhee—and to consider Rauschenberg’s work in relation to journalism, activism, and politics.

Produced between the 1960s and 1990s, the works presented in Rauschenberg & the News reveal the artist’s sustained engagement with the rapidly shifting political landscape of the twentieth century, registering urgent responses to moments of social and political unrest as they unfolded in real time. Throughout his decades-long career, he dedicated himself to critically examining what he famously described as the gap between art and life, making use of everyday materials—newspaper stories, headlines, photographs, and other fragments of mass media—to capture pivotal historical moments, from environmental disasters and industrial extractivism to the civil rights movement and anti-war protests. 

Illuminating these themes, this program grapples with critical intersections between art and politics that spurred Rauschenberg’s practice and are an indelible part of his legacy. Speakers are: Juliana Ochs Dweck, Chief Curator of the Princeton Art Museum, co-curator of the 2019 exhibition of the artist’s Currents series, a suite of large-scale screenprints based on collaged newspaper imagery that Rauschenberg collected from US publications; Helen Hsu, Associate Curator for Research at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, who speaks on the artist’s print practice and expansive use of the multiple; and Margaret Rhee, poet, scholar, New School faculty member, and Vera List Center Academic Advisory Council member, who considers how Rauschenberg’s artistic response to the political urgencies of the time, from the civil rights movement to the Vietnam War, resonated with and was amplified by his contemporaries. 

Reflecting these intersections of activism and journalism, this installation also provides the impetus for the 2025–2026 Vera List New School Art Collection Student Writing Awards, which examine Rauschenberg’s artistic and activist legacies through original scholarship by New School students.

The opening reception includes an introduction by Emily Clayton, Senior Collections Manager for The New School Art Collection. Welcome remarks by The New School president Joel Towers proceed the panel, which is moderated by Carin Kuoni, Senior Director/Chief Curator of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.