A lifelong environmentalist, Robert Rauschenberg dedicated his career to examining—and fighting for—the environment. In 1970, the American Environment Foundation announced they would be celebrating the first Earth Day in April of that year. The goal was to raise awareness about the dangers of pollution, following a massive oil spill off the California coast in 1969. The event, which has often been hailed as the birth of the modern environmentalist movement, followed the grassroots organizing efforts of the anti-war movement of the time, and served as a kind of “teach-in” to galvanize the community and focus on environmental justice. More than 20 million Americans participated in the inaugural Earth Day that year. To promote the event, Rauschenberg created Earth Day, 1970, a graphic collage featuring photos of crowded highways, deforested land, garbage, and pollution caused by factories, centered around a giant bald eagle—the U.S. symbol that, at the time, was on the verge of extinction due to pollution and pesticides.

This poster was the first in a number of collaborations he did to support the annual event, creating another poster for Earth Day 1990, and a work at the 1991 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development’s Earth Summit. These works exemplified Rauschenberg’s role as an artist, depicting the world around him, and became a blueprint for large collage-works and commissions, such as Periwinkle Shaft, 1979-80, a commission by The Arts in Public Places Program of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) for the Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Washington, DC.

“The NEA’s commission began during one of Rauschenberg’s most prolific periods, between 1975 and 1981, while he was creating the series known as the Spreads. Both literal and metaphorical in meaning, the Spreads refer to the physical size of the works and the colloquial term used to describe the wide-open expanses of land in Texas, where the artist was raised. The reference to the origins of the artist in this series is important, as the Spreads is where the artist returned to his roots in his choice of materials and techniques, particularly those that reference his earlier series of Combines, silkscreen paintings and photography. Throughout the series, Rauschenberg alternates between the simple and the complex, the formal and the experimental.

Periwinkle Shaft is a quintessential example of the Spreads… a personal retrospective of sorts, yet it is simultaneously imbued with the playful palette and motifs that one would expect from a commission of this nature: bright colors, energetic shapes, kinetic forms, humorous juxtapositions and relatable imagery, such as silhouettes of a duck, an enlarged apple and a three-dimensional fish. In this work, Rauschenberg brings to bear his full arsenal of artistic powers on a grand scale, creating a monumental work that engages and inspires.” (Excerpt courtesy of Edward Tyler Nayhem).

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