Discover the Textile Works of Robert Rauschenberg at The Menil Collection

This majestic fall in Houston, The Menil Collection unfurls a lyrical exploration of cloth, color, and light with “Robert Rauschenberg: Fabric Works of the 1970s,” on view from September 19–March 1, 2026. Rejoicing in the centennial of the Texas-born artist in collaboration with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the exhibition is the first museum survey devoted to Rauschenberg’s profound embrace of fabric during this tremendous decade. Drawing on significant loans from both public collections and the artist’s foundation, the show unearths the alchemy of silk, lace, and industrial textiles transformed into buoyant, experimental works that hover between painting, sculpture, and performance.

As part of Rauschenberg100, a global initiative honoring the artist’s hundredth birthday, the Menil’s presentation joins an international chorus of exhibitions and programs reframing Rauschenberg’s legacy for today. The Menil itself holds a long history with the artist, dating back to John and Dominique de Menil’s early acquisitions and friendships in the 1960s, and now cares for nearly ninety of his works alongside extensive archival material.

A richly illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition, offering fresh scholarship on the artist’s fabric pieces within the contexts of late modernism, postminimalism, and the wider discourses of gender, craft, and collaboration. The catalogue also traces Rauschenberg’s youthful enthusiasm for fashion design and his enduring devotion to interdisciplinary exchange—threads that weave through his career and emerge vibrantly in these 1970s works.

In addition to the exhibition, the Menil gifts an evocative series of programs—from curator talks and scholarly panels to workshops and dance performances—that reflect the artist’s own commitment to collaboration and community.

In advance of the opening, Whitewall spoke with Michelle White, Senior Curator of the Menil Collection, about Rauschenberg’s daring mid-career turn to fabric in the 1970s, his early roots in fashion design, and how this centennial exhibition renews the Menil’s deep connection to the Texas-born artist.

WHITEWALL: This is the first museum survey devoted to Rauschenberg’s use of fabric in the 1970s. What do you think this period reveals about the artist?

MICHELLE WHITE: In the 1970s, Robert Rauschenberg was in his 50s. He was an artist at mid-career who had had such tremendous success beginning in the late 1950s. As early as 1964, he was called the most important artist America has produced since Jackson Pollock. So it’s an illustrious career at this point. 

What’s so interesting about this period is that Rauschenberg makes a pretty significant pivot with his use of fabrics. In fact, to such a degree that when he first showed them in the 1970s, critics did not know what to do with them and many thought that they weren’t great. For an artist with such an esteemed background this was such an interesting shift. He’s going to a more minimalist vocabulary. He’s working with material in such a way that it’s lacking all of the kind of signature moves that had defined Rauschenberg’s career thus far. What I love about the show is it reveals how deeply experimental Rauschenberg was throughout his life. He did not rest on his laurels but continued to aggressively experiment into new ways of making and thinking well into his life—and continued to do so until the very end. It’s such an important facet of understanding the importance of Rauschenberg’s work.

Fabric as a Driving Force

WW: Rauschenberg had an early interest in fashion design. How do you see that background informing his handling of materials like silk, lace, and cheesecloth?

MW: It’s everything. The work in this show and from this moment are very much something of a culmination of his earliest interests in fashion design. It’s an aspect of his biography that hasn’t come out very much in past scholarship and past biographies of the artist.

“What I love about the show is it reveals how deeply experimental Rauschenberg was throughout his life,”

Michelle White

It’s fascinating to note that for Rauschenberg, one of his first ambitions after coming out of the Navy, and during his time in the Navy in Southern California, was to be a fashion designer. His first formal art education was at the Kansas City Art Institute where he studied fashion design. Of course, Rauschenberg then goes on to do so much work with costumes, with his work with Merce Cunningham beginning in the 1950s. His understanding of cloth, of drapery, of the relationship of fabric to the body, has long been a part of his work and understanding by the time we get to the 1970s. The work as we see in this show really pushes fabric to the floor. It’s not just among a list of other found objects for which Rauschenberg so beautifully handled, but it really kind of becomes the driving force.

WW: Several of the series on view—the Venetians, Hoarfrosts, and Jammers—engage fabric in very different ways, from draped structures to printed sheers to sail-like installations. Can you tell us more about these?

MW: Going back to the importance of fabric in his work, Rauschenberg, from the very beginning, is an artist that worked in series, and often in really kind of intense bursts of activity around particular groups. That was certainly the case in the 1970s with the Venetians, the Hoarfrosts, and the Jammers, which are primarily the focus of the exhibition. I was excited to bring them all together, first because they were done in such a short period of time in the 1970s, but also because what they share, and what they reveal in such a beautiful way, is Rauschenberg’s preoccupation with cloth. 

I think what you just described in that list is how he was interested in such a variety of ways of thinking and working with cloth. That manifests as an extraordinary variety of different types of materials. There’s found mosquito nets, found lace curtains. There’s bolts of crimson silk and transparent. So throughout the story, you see that it wasn’t just one particular type of material, but many different types. He was interested in thinking about how, which you’ll see in the show, fabric moves. It expresses a certain sensuality and connection with ideas of skin and flesh, but also how beautiful it can be when it’s suspended against a wall or how particular types of material, particularly the silks that he brought back from India, would carry such a sense of pungent color.

“What they reveal in such a beautiful way, is Rauschenberg’s preoccupation with cloth,”

Michelle White

In some of the Jammers, we can see that he’s just simply suspending pieces of bright blue silks. It has a way of carrying colors, almost like a monochrome painting. And it’s so simple, but so strong and visually compelling.

Energized by the Natural Wonders of Captiva Island 

WW: The decade of the 1970s coincided with Rauschenberg’s move to Captiva Island. How did this shift in environment shape his relationship with textiles, light, and movement?

MW: His home in Captiva, which I visited last June, is extraordinary. It’s surrounded by water on either side of his property. There is this idea of ocean breezes and nautical references that he makes throughout his work. There’s a sense of light and movement in all of these works that feels attached to what it means to live on the water. 

At the time, he also got into wind surfing. So of course, with the Jammers, we can see the connection between this idea of maneuvering fabric and lightweight poles, and thinking about catching the wind on the water that is certainly within the vocabulary of certain works. But also more broadly for Captiva, it represents a material shift for the artist. 

“There’s a sense of light and movement in all of these works that feels attached to what it means to live on the water,”

Michelle White

Rauschenberg, up until this point, of course, is known as an artist who’s using everyday stuff from the urban environment, things he collects from the street constitute the radical nature of his work beginning in the late 1950s. As he often said in talking about his move to Captiva, ‘nothing much washes up on the beach here.’ He was faced with something of a clean slate on those sandy beaches of thinking about new ways to use materials. I think the reductive nature of so much of his work from the 1970s reflects this.

The Joy and Impact of Artistic Collaboration

WW: Rauschenberg’s collaborations with dance, music, and theater are also highlighted in this exhibition. What drew Rauschenberg to these modes of performance? 

MW: Rauschenberg studied at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, which, beginning before World War II, had become quite an important center of avant-garde production in the United States—and avant-garde production that encompassed multidisciplinary approaches to making. It’s here at Black Mountain where you get these really innovative ways of thinking about dialogues between choreography, music, dance, and poetry. 

Rauschenberg was a mesh within this new philosophical approach for what it means to be an artist, that it’s not just isolated to one particular medium. It is at Black Mountain when he meets John Cage and Merce Cunningham, two really important collaborators. Rauschenberg joins their work together at the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, where he starts doing, among other facets of his involvement, stage design, sets, costumes, and lighting. He continues his work with Cunningham through 1964. So it’s an important collaboration.

“Rauschenberg was a mesh within this new philosophical approach for what it means to be an artist,”

Michelle White

Going back to fabric, the idea that Rauschenberg is working with choreographers, and choosing materials for costumes, and working on stage sets, is quite important to the fabric work of the 1970s. He wraps up his work with Cunningham in the mid-60s, but towards the end of the 1970s, he did a new piece with Cunningham. It represents a 10 year period, or pause, when he goes back to work with Cunningham on a piece called Travelog. For this piece, he designs the costumes and the sets.

For this show, we’ve worked with the Walker Art Center at displaying a selection of those sets, and we’re showing documentation of the performance. You really get this connection between how he’s working with fabric and how it’s so deeply intertwined with his past work with dance, his interest in the moving body, and his formative time early on, thinking about really expansive ways of making art.

WW: How did those collaborations impact his studio practice?

MW: What I’m trying to argue with the fabric works is they absolutely come out of these collaborations and his larger interest in costuming, fashion, and dance.

Celebrating Robert Rauschenberg’s Legacy with The Menil Collection 

WW: The Menil Collection has a long history with Rauschenberg, dating back to its founders and Walter Hopps. How does this exhibition continue that legacy, and what does it mean to present this centennial show in Texas, the artist’s home state?

MW: We are so proud and thrilled to be able to be a part of a larger international celebration of Rauschenberg at 100. We are among many exhibitions taking place. But of course, Menil is deeply connected to Rauschenberg, not only because he was born not far from where this museum is right now. He was born in Port Arthur, which is about 90 miles from here. But the museum has had a long history. 

John and Dominique de Menil were champions of his work beginning in the 1960s. They were introduced to him by their daughter, Christophe de Menil. They hired Walter Hopps to lead their future museum, and Hopps came on to run the Menil collection in 1980. At the time, he had just completed a tour of Rauschenberg’s retrospective. He was quite close to the artist. With that, he brought multiple shows to the Menil Collection over the next two decades or so, beginning with a project he did on Rauschenberg’s early work from the 1950s. And then another retrospective that was in the 90s. Then there was an exhibition on Rauschenberg’s cardboard series that opened in 2006 here. 

“We are so proud and thrilled to be able to be a part of a larger international celebration of Rauschenberg at 100,”

Michelle White

I was thinking about what we could do to continue the relationship with the artist and our legacy of presenting Rauschenberg shows. What I loved about the shows that Rauschenberg did, specifically the shows from the 1950s and the cardboard shows, is that he had taken an aspect, a lesser known aspect of Rauschenberg’s production, and used the show as a way of examining and looking at a period in the artist’s career.

I was excited to do the same, and very much saw this group of works, the maverick works of the 1970s, as having so much potential to renew knowledge about the artist, to show for our audiences that even think they might be familiar with Rauschenberg, another side of the artist. Much of the research we were able to do for this show is in a publication that we did, that we’re also very proud of, that brings together a new scholarship and new ways of thinking about the importance of fabric, even more broadly, within Rauschenberg’s life.

A Stunning Exploration Unfolds in Houston

WW: Was there something you learned about Rauschenberg that surprised you when putting this show together?

MW: At the Menil Collection, we have a really wonderful archive of letters from Rauschenberg’s friend in Port Arthur, and they were then roommates at UT Austin together. It’s an extensive correspondence as Robert Rauschenberg goes out into the world from high school to UT Austin to the Navy.

In this correspondence, which we’re so fortunate to have, we’ve learned so much about Rauschenberg’s early aspirations. Within this archive is an incredible way of understanding his early interest in fashion, which includes a portfolio of dress designs that he sketched and sent to his friend. Within the letters he wrote, he’s sketching what the women on the dance floors of the Hollywood canteen were wearing, with detailed notes about the color and the fit. It’s quite an extraordinary and revelatory group of letters that very much formed the background of this exhibition’s focus on fabric.

“Within this archive is an incredible way of understanding his early interest in fashion,”

Michelle White

WW: What would you like viewers to walk away from this show with?

MW: Hopefully a renewed appreciation of what a remarkably inventive thinker, artist, and maker that Rauschenberg was throughout his life. And more generally, even with those that we think we know well, there could still be so much space to explore an artist’s work. I think this work is surprising and beautiful.