Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg (b.1925, Port Arhtur, Texas) studied at the Kansas City Art Institute; the Academie Julian, Paris; Black Mountain College with Josef Albers; and at the Art Students' League, New York. He has exhibited in group, and one-person exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Tate Gallery, London; the Pompidou Center, Paris, as well as many other prominent museums worldwide. He was the first American to win the prestigious Venice Biennale Grand Prize in 1964.

Rauschenberg uses art to communicate his concerns about social injustice, cultural insensitivity, the environment and human rights. Through silkscreen, Rauschenberg found he could compress fragments of events as well as objects into his work, giving the work a heightened, broken-up documentary flavor.

The Chow Bag Series is a portfolio of six silkscreens with collage and hand sewing, printed in 1977. In these prints, he has fragmented and reassembled images derived from animal food packages, real and imagined to raise questions about the nature of reality and illusion.