In 2025, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation will commemorate Robert Rauschenberg’s 100th birthday with an international celebration of the artist’s expansive creativity, spirit of curiosity, and commitment to change. Kicking off in 2025 and continuing through 2026, Centennial activities will revisit Rauschenberg through the eyes of our time, foregrounding his prescience and enduring influence on generations of artists and advocates for social progress.
Over the course of the Centennial year, special events will bring leading artists, activists, and scholars into contemporary dialogue with Rauschenberg’s visionary ideas on art, technology, environmentalism, and social justice. These events will span exhibitions and performances, Centennial grants, major publications, scholarly projects, and more, activating the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation’s New York headquarters and the artist’s Archive, as well as prominent cultural institutions around the world.
Exhibitions and performances
The Centennial will welcome a slate of international exhibitions—with seven major institutional presentations—and activities exposing the breadth of Rauschenberg’s transdisciplinary and collaborative practice. By opening up the artist’s legacy to present-day interpretation, the Centennial embraces different understandings, forges cross-disciplinary connections, and creates opportunities for critical exchange.
Five Friends: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly
Museum Brandhorst, Munich, April 10–August 17, 2025
Museum Ludwig, Cologne, October 3, 2025–January 11, 2026
Robert Rauschenberg’s New York: Pictures from the Real World
Museum of the City of New York, September 13, 2025–March 22, 2026
Robert Rauschenberg: Fabric Works of the 1970s
The Menil Collection, Houston, September 19, 2025–March 1, 2026
Robert Rauschenberg: The Use of Images
Fundación Juan March, Madrid, October 3, 2025–January 18, 2026
Robert Rauschenberg and Asia
M+, Hong Kong, November 2025–April 2026
Robert Rauschenberg: Image and Gesture
Kunsthalle Krems, Austria, March 2026–October 2026
In addition to these institutional presentations, solo exhibitions at Gladstone Gallery, New York (May 2025) and Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris (October 2025) will celebrate the artist’s legacy in the Centennial year. Furthermore, the 2025 edition of miart in Milan (April 4 – 6, 2025), Milan’s annual modern and contemporary fair, will draw on Rauschenberg’s life and work as its curatorial theme. In celebration of Rauschenberg’s iconic designs for dance, Trisha Brown Dance Company and the Merce Cunningham Trust plan to collaborate to honor his work during the Rauschenberg Centennial.
Centennial grants
Rauschenberg’s wide-ranging and enduring commitment to philanthropy will be mirrored in a series of Centennial grants. In keeping with the artist’s commitment to collaborative and international engagement, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation has invited institutions around the world with Rauschenberg holdings to honor the artist by mounting dedicated installations of his work from their permanent collections. To date, twenty-two institutions have received support related to exhibitions, scholarship, conservation, performances, educational programming, and more.
For a list of Centennial grant recipients, visit rauschenberg100.org/program/grants.
Research and scholarship
Major publications and scholarly projects will be released in the Centennial year, further extending Rauschenberg’s reach and accessibility. The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation has embarked on an ongoing project to create a digital catalogue raisonné of the artist’s paintings and sculpture. The first volume, covering works from 1948–1953, will be published during the Centennial. In addition to the resources found in a conventional catalogue raisonné, it will also feature essays by artists, conservators, critics, scholars, and writers to present a range of perspectives that is commensurate with the expansiveness of Rauschenberg’s thinking as well as his profound curiosity and openness to new ideas and ways of working.
Further scholarly projects include a new monograph to be published by Yale University Press in October 2025. I Don’t Think About Being Great: Select Statements and Writings presents 100 passages from Rauschenberg’s little-known body of written work.
For information and updates on Centennial programming and news, visit rauschenberg100.org, and follow the conversation on Instagram and Facebook. #Rauschenberg100.
