“Dancing with Bob”: A Celebration of Trisha Brown, Merce Cunningham & Robert Rauschenberg’s Creative Collaborations

Born Milton Ernest Rauschenberg in 1925 in the refinery town of Port Arthur, TX, Rauschenberg grew up in poverty but pursued higher education, attending the University of Texas at Austin to study pharmacology. After getting expelled his freshman year for refusing to dissect a frog, the U.S. civilian draft for WWII led him to a Navy Corps hospital in San Diego, where he was introduced to new kinds of art at the Huntington Art Gallery in California. Through the GI Bill, he enrolled in art classes at Kansas State University, further cultivating his passion for art. He reinvented himself as “Bob” and continued his studies at Paris’ Académie Julian, where he met his lifelong friend, Susan Weil.

While in Paris, Weil and Rauschenberg studied and saved up money to move to North Carolina’s acclaimed Black Mountain College, where they would study under the artist and famed director, Josef Albers. Albers’ harsh criticism of Rauschenberg’s work influenced the rest of his life’s work, especially his investigations of line, texture, and color of everyday materials. Bob and Susan moved to New York City in 1951 to get married, raise their new baby, and live as fixtures of the city’s Abstract Expressionist scene. Ultimately, Susan and Bob divorced, but the artistic and cultural impact of their move is still felt today. The following decades in New York were artistically productive for Rauschenberg, whose deeply conceptual art was driven by the idea that artists had the authority to define art. This idea impacted the century’s most influential Pop artists, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.

Bob’s artistic legacy was chiseled out through a long series of collaborations throughout the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Rauschenberg’s experimentation with set and costume design, alongside fellow Black Mountain College Alumnus Merce Cunningham (choreographer) and John Cage (composer), would shake the art world and redefine ideas of creative and collaborative processes. Collaboration with Cunningham, who believed music and set decor should stand on their own rather than serve the choreography, involved working independently without much input from the other collaborators. Rauschenberg recalls, “It was the most exciting, and most real, because nobody knew what anybody else was doing until it was too late”—that is, the elements of dance, music, and decor did not come together until the final rehearsals (Rauschenberg Foundation).

This unique approach is particularly evident in Cunningham’s Travelogue (1977), which hasn’t been staged by a professional company since 1979 but will be performed by Trisha Brown Dance Company during Northrop’s program on Nov 11. Travelogue marked Rauschenberg’s first collaboration with Cunningham and Cage since 1964; between 1954 and 2007, the group worked together on a total of 23 performance pieces. The work features Cage’s composition Telephone and Birds—a collage of bird sounds, telephone messages, and other recognizable noises—and Rauschenberg’s Tantric Geography (1977), which is part of the Walker’s collection and features a row of chairs mounted on white platforms separated by bicycle wheels, with colorful silk fans that echo the recurring color wheels found throughout his work.

Among the most distinguished and visionary pioneers of postmodern dance, choreographer Trisha Brown also significantly influenced Rauschenberg, and vice versa. The alignment of their boundary-pushing artistic ethos—plus their “uncanny connection,” as Brown describes—burgeoned a life-long friendship and professional relationship that shaped the landscape of dance and visual art. Brown met Rauschenberg during the 1960s at Merce Cunningham’s New York studio. After founding the Trisha Brown Dance Company in 1970, Brown elected Rauschenberg as chairman of the board, and he fervently supported her company during his career.

Rauschenberg and the Twin Cities were deeply connected, primarily through the Walker Art Center, where his work was included in 14 shows starting in 1961 and spanning 40 years. The museum owns an important early painting by him, Trophy II (for Teeny and Marcel Duchamp) plus more than 130 works on paper. For the reopening of the Walker's building in 1971, Rauschenberg was commissioned to create Works for New Spaces, contributing a cubistic sculpture made of cardboard (Minnesota Star Tribune).

Additionally, Rauschenberg’s collaborations with choreographers Cunningham and Brown, and composers Anderson and Cage pulled him even closer to the Walker, which has heavily featured these artists as well. The Walker purchased an archive of around 4,300 costumes, decor, posters, photographs, and sketches representing 150 of Cunningham’s choreographic works, forming the core of the museum’s 2017 landmark exhibition Merce Cunningham: Common Time.

Brown’s Glacial Decoy (1979) formalized their collaborative relationship, trailblazing the convergence of dance and visual art with Rauschenberg’s set design. Glacial Decoy also marked Brown’s first piece for the proscenium stage, as she previously and inventively showed her work in unconventional spaces, such as rooftops, art galleries, and museums.In conjunction with the Nov 11 Dancing with Bob performance, Trisha Brown and Robert Rauschenberg: Glacial Decoy, featuring Rauschenberg’s costume and set design for Brown’s pioneering piece Glacial Decoy (1979), is on display at the Walker now through May 24, 2026.

Set and Reset/Reset Revisited

Rauschenberg’s legacy can be found at the University of Minnesota (UMN) as well. His collaboration with Trisha Brown Dance Company and Laurie Anderson, Set and Reset (1983), was restaged in 2008 for the University’s theatre and dance students as Set and Reset/Reset. The impact of Rauschenberg and his contemporaries on Minneapolis is far-reaching, across the city’s museums, classrooms, and stages. To learn more, visit Northrop’s lobby beginning at 6:30 pm before the Nov 11 show to view displays from University Libraries, as well as the Walker Art Center and Weisman Art Museum. Swing by to get an up-close look at historical costumes from the University’s restaging of Set and Reset/Reset, while listening to featured UMN student performances in the style of Cage and Anderson from the University New Music Ensemble.

Rauschenberg’s work was not critically appreciated during the height of its production in the mid-20th century, even receiving the moniker “enfant terrible,” according to the Walker Art Center. However, the numerous accolades and honors Rauschenberg’s work later received, and continues to receive, illuminate a clearer perspective of his legacy. Rauschenberg was awarded the International Grand Prize in Painting at the United States Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 1963, while exhibiting his first major retrospective at the Jewish Museum in New York. He hosted galleries across the world: ICA Philadelphia (1970); Musée d’Art et d’Industrie, Saint Étienne, France (1974); the Smithsonian, Washington DC (1976); Staatliche Kunsthalle, Berlin (1980); and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1982 and 1999). He also won the 2nd Inter-American Biennial of Printmaking in Santiago, Chile, in 1976, and received two posthumous honorary doctorates, one from the University of South Florida, Tampa, and the other from the Kansas City Arts Institute. In 2016, London’s Tate hosted a retrospective of Rauschenberg’s work, which was also exhibited in New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA).