Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg
From the Collection of Terry Van Brunt: Love Letters
Thursday, June 27 – August 4, 2002; 6pm (Opening Reception)
SF LGBT Community Center, 1800 Market St, 3rd Floor
The opening exhibition of the new QCC Gallery is a highly important display of some 50 works by Robert Rauschenberg, most of which have never before been publicly exhibited. This is a very personal collection, for every work in it was a gift from Robert Rauschenberg to Terry van Brunt, once the artist’s chief assistant and a companion. Assembled as a private collection by the man who was perhaps the central focus of Rauschenberg’s life for much of the 70s and 80s, it exposes a side of Rauschenberg ignored by mainstream museums. Alternately whimsical and moving, this collection reveals a clear thematic coherence behind what is generally understood as Rauschenberg’s random juxtaposition of collage elements.
Robert Rauschenberg is widely celebrated as one of the greatest living artists in the world. Rauschenberg introduced the silkscreened photograph, the found object, and evocative collage into an art world then dominated by the pyrotechnics of flung paint; the gestural brush strokes of Willem de Kooning, the drips and splatters of Jackson Pollock. Using such recognizable imagery, Rauschenberg almost singlehandedly carried the stuff of the world back into American art.
Robert Rauschenberg from the Collection of Terry van Brunt is the first in series of exhibitions dedicated to an art history sadly still ignored. And the selection of an artist of Rauschenberg’s import is ample evidence of the Gallery’s commitment to present both artwork and scholarship of the highest order. The mission of the Qcc Gallery is to borrow important works from public and private collections to finally enable the display of a full, uncensored art history.
Gallery Tours with the Curator
Jonathan Katz
Robert Rauschenberg: From the Collection of Terry Van Brunt: Love Letters
Friday, July 5; 6 pm
Saturday, July 6; 2 pm & 6 pm
Sunday, July 7; 2 pm & 6 pm
SF LGBT Community Center, 1800 Market St, 3rd Floor
Join Rauschenberg scholar and exhibition curator, Jonathan Katz for a guided tour of this gallery-opening exhibition. The tour includes a discussion of the work in the gallery and a slide show and talk. Limit: 20 people per tour. Reserve early, this will sell out.
Exhibition Curator, Jonathan D. Katz
Jonathan D. Katz, Ph.D, is a former chair of the Department of GLBT Studies at CCSF, founder of Harvey Milk Institute and the first tenured faculty in gay and lesbian studies in the U.S. A leading Robert Rauschenberg scholar and curator of this exhibition, he has written a book on Rauschenberg, which will be published by University of Chicago Press in 2003. Katz is currently the Executive Coordinator of the Larry Kramer Initiative for Queer Studies and Associate Research Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies at Yale University.