From Munich to Hong Kong, this 12 months has been crowded with centennial tributes to Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), whom the critic Robert Hughes described in 2006 as “a very powerful American artist of the final century”. Even with this world affect, Florida remained the artist’s centre of gravity for 4 many years, as supplies and collaborators from the Sunshine State powered a lot of his breakthroughs—from his experiments with cardboard and scrap metallic to the Rauschenberg Abroad Cultural Interchange (Roci), a seven-year programme that positioned artwork as cultural diplomacy on the tail finish of the Chilly Battle.
As Miami Artwork Week once more convenes the artwork world in Florida, Rauschenberg’s presence within the state each widens and narrows. Past the presence of his work on the stands of Gladstone Gallery and Thaddaeus Ropac at Artwork Basel Miami Seashore, two initiatives right here mark the second. Robert Rauschenberg: Actual Time at NSU Artwork Museum Fort Lauderdale (till 26 April 2026) is among the artist’s last centennial exhibitions, whereas the guide Out of the Actual World: Robert Rauschenberg at USF Graphicstudio might be revealed later this month to spotlight the artist’s in depth collaboration with the Tampa print workshop.
But the Robert Rauschenberg Basis introduced this previous summer season that it might finish its prestigious artist residency on Captiva Island and promote Rauschenberg’s dwelling and studio there. Coming amid the year-long celebration of the artist’s legacy, this determination warrants a glance again at how Rauschenberg’s Florida years formed his ambitions and accomplishments.
Escape from New York
Born in Port Arthur, Texas, Rauschenberg led an itinerant formative years. He pursued pharmacology on the College of Texas at Austin, served within the US Navy Hospital Corps in San Diego, then pivoted to artwork on the Kansas Metropolis Artwork Institute. His creating follow later took him to the Académie Julian in Paris and to Black Mountain Faculty in North Carolina, the place he met future collaborators together with John Cage and Merce Cunningham.
Rauschenberg moved to New York in 1949 to check on the Artwork College students League and spent practically 20 years in Manhattan. His circle there included Cy Twombly, Susan Weil (his spouse from 1950-52) and Jasper Johns, his one-time romantic companion.
No Wake Glut (1986) was a part of a present of Rauschenberg’s Glut works—sculptures the artist created from scrap metallic, corresponding to outdated indicators and automobile components—at Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in Paris earlier this 12 months Photograph: Charles Duprat
However in autumn 1960, annoyed with an absence of progress on his Dante drawings, Rauschenberg sought isolation on Treasure Island, off Florida’s west coast. By 1968, he had bought property on Captiva, a barrier island additional south. Though he maintained a Manhattan studio, Rauschenberg relocated to Captiva in 1970, finally changing into its largest non-public landowner.
Rauschenberg’s shift to the island echoed a broader sample of post-war artists in search of distance from the New York Metropolis grind: Agnes Martin left for New Mexico in 1967; Ellsworth Kelly settled in Spencertown, New York, in 1970; Johns established a base on the Caribbean island of St Martin in 1972; and Brice Marden developed a summer season studio on Hydra, Greece, within the early Seventies.
For Rauschenberg, Captiva was each studio and topic. Describing the island as holding “a magic that was unexplainable in its energy”, he wrote to the Orlando Sentinel critic Philip Bishop: “I’ve thanked my intuition daily I’m right here and once I can’t be, Captiva is the inspiration of my life and my work.”
New supplies, new visions
Courtney J. Martin, the manager director of the Rauschenberg Basis, tells The Artwork Newspaper that “Florida served not solely as his dwelling but in addition as a catalyst for creative innovation that continues to resonate globally.” One technique to hint that innovation is thru the supplies that outlined the artist’s Captiva years. They vary from works on cloth (many on view on the Menil Assortment in Houston till 1 March 2026) to his scrap-metal Glut sculptures, which Thaddaeus Ropac launched to France through an exhibition on the gallery’s Paris house this autumn.
“Maybe essentially the most shocking side of Rauschenberg’s works from his first decade in Captiva is their magnificence,” say the organisers of his present at NSU Artwork Museum—the museum’s director and chief curator, Bonnie Clearwater, and the curator Ariella Wolens. “Even when utilizing the lowliest of supplies, such because the cardboard containers that fashioned his first collection of latest work begun in Captiva in 1971, he distilled their alluring magnificence and elevated their place as artwork.”
Graphicstudio emerged as a vital companion on this period. Mark Fredricks, the editor of Out of the Actual World and a researcher on the printshop, says the collaboration “occurred over two most important phases, 1972-74 and 1983-87”,and proved prolific. The primary two years alone yielded 22 mixed-media prints and 5 sculptural editions. Amongst them—and on view at NSU Artwork Museum—is Switchboard (Airport Suite) (1974), Graphicstudio’s first challenge primarily realised off-site, partly by transport an etching press to Rauschenberg on Captiva. The title nods to the artist’s peripatetic schedule; the editions, made completely on cloth helps, had been signed in a Tampa airport resort room. Clearwater and Wolens describe the works as “gossamer-like”, fluttering in an “unchoreographed dance stirred by the viewer’s personal motion”.
Out of the Actual World additionally underscores the wide-ranging collaboration between Rauschenberg and Graphicstudio’s founder, Donald Saff, who met the artist in Greenwich Village within the Nineteen Sixties. Along with his position in editioning, Saff served because the creative director of Roci (named for Rauschenberg’s pet turtle, Rocky), an initiative largely funded by the artist and mixing cultural diplomacy, workshops and a travelling exhibition.
Roci toured ten international locations that Rauschenberg recognized as “delicate”, from East Germany to Venezuela. He added new, site-responsive works at every cease alongside the items proven in earlier venues. “Roci is, in impact, Rauschenberg’s approach of appearing personally on behalf of ideas as world and daunting as peace and understanding,” Saff stated in 1991.
Serving as a key liaison, Saff convened native artists, writers and poets for catalogues tailor-made to every website, bringing the world into dialogue with Rauschenberg’s Florida studio and sending Captiva’s ethos of experimentation throughout the globe.
Rauschenberg’s legacy
Rauschenberg’s collaboration-rich Florida years and its setting reshaped how later artists labored with supplies, website and neighborhood. The Rauschenberg Basis transformed a lot of the Captiva property right into a residency in 2012, and greater than 500 artists of all types have since handed by—together with Kevin Beasley, Douglas Coupland, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Senga Nengudi and Jennie C. Jones.
“Captiva was totally different from different residencies in some ways,” says Jones, a 2014 resident. “Bob’s legacy was tangible; the place was crammed with the gravity of his footprint on the world.” Throughout her residency, Jones made a collection of works on paper that she describes as “considering items”.
“That form of experimentation can really feel weak, however Captiva felt protected,” Jones says. “That spirit of doing felt profoundly linked to Bob himself.”
She remembers the campus as “a magical however fragile surroundings”, and Captiva’s environmental precarity has turn out to be insurmountable within the decade since. In 2021, Kendall Baldwin of WXY Structure, who had labored on the campus since 2016, described Captiva to the Santiva Chronicle as “tremendously weak”, however famous that “the inspiration is working with local weather change, not towards local weather change”. Injury from latest storms—Hurricane Ian in 2022 and Hurricane Milton in 2024—has wrought additional challenges to the property. The formal announcement to shut and promote the 22-acre property got here in August 2025; the inspiration’s assertion cites the “recurring storm injury, broader local weather dangers and rising upkeep prices” as its prime causes.
“It’s not simple to course of the inspiration’s determination due to the highly effective legacy and expertise myself and others had there,” Jones says. “However local weather change is all too actual. It’s affecting every part—together with Captiva.”
Proceeds from the sale, along with funds beforehand earmarked for the campus’s maintenance, will probably be redeployed to extra versatile types of artist help. On this approach, even the promoting of Rauschenberg’s compound will advance the legacy of the island and the artist who known as it dwelling.
