08/29/2026
"A blue-tinted image of John F. Kennedy hovers in the center of this work by Robert Rauschenberg, pulled from a photograph and flattened into a screenprint, surrounded by fragments that don’t quite settle into a single scene. A hand gestures, an astronaut parachutes, pictures stack and slip past each other. Rauschenberg builds the painting out of the same material Americans were starting to live through—mass-media imagery from television, newspapers, and magazines. Made soon after Kennedy’s assassination, it feels less like a tribute than a record of how quickly a person becomes an image and then an icon. This is what the country looked like to itself at the time, and what it increasingly looks like now, with experience filtered through media and meaning assembled on the fly from whatever is in circulation. —D.C."
Every work in our collection makes a statement about a specific moment in time. See what speaks to you by planning a visit soon.
This artwork description was taken from artNEWS's "Top 100 Artworks about America." Read the full article: go.mcachicago.org/artnews-100
