The Haggerty Museum of Art happens to hold a dozen prints from Robert Rauschenberg’s “Stoned Moon” series, which mainly looks at the Apollo 11 lunar mission.
In the fall of 2025, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation began contacting museums around the country that hold significant amounts of Rauschenberg’s work, hoping to honor the 20th-century American artist in the 100th year since his birth.
That’s when Kirk Nickel, the Haggerty Museum’s Curator of European Art, and Jennifer Johung, a professor of Contemporary Art and Architecture and the director of the Center for 21st-Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, began curating an exhibition that would both honor and revitalize Rauschenberg’s work.
The Haggerty is one of over 30 museums across the world to honor Rauschenberg’s life with an exhibition.
“We wanted to ask, ‘What questions are artists asking today around technology, the environment, human possibility and how technology is changing?’” Nickel said.
Nickel and Johung decided on showcasing “Stoned Moon” next to three current artists: Kite, Trevor Paglen and Jason S. Yi. The show would be called “This Side of the Stars: Rauschenberg’s ‘Stoned Moon’ in the Company of Kite, Paglen and Yi,” and went up Jan. 23.
“The three artists’ work looks different from each other and different from Rauschenberg, but we really felt that there were a number of conversations happening around topics of how we come to know the world around us,” Nickel said.
Yi, a Milwaukee-based multimedia artist and professor at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, wanted to continue his track record of using materials, such as spray insulation foam or starch packing peanuts, in his art that surprises people in this exhibition.
When approaching his section of the gallery, eight life-size birds made of mulberry paper are stacked one on top of the other, towering over 20 feet in the air.
“These red-crowned cranes hold a super strong symbolic value within the tradition of East Asian countries,” Yi said. “They represent fortune, hope and longevity.”
These birds have become even more symbolic after finding a safe haven in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea when they were previously endangered, according to Yi.
“Born out of that tumultuous, tragic, symbolic area is this beautiful paradise for the animals and plant matter,” Yi said. “So, I thought that was super ironic, and interesting and also very indicative of things that are unfolding around us in our environment.”
Rauschenberg’s colorful, sometimes puzzling prints containing images of the Apollo 11 contrast with Paglen’s calm, wide shot landscape images of space and skies. Both ask questions about the purpose of technology and the vastness of the cosmos.
“Artists are part of a long thread,” Nickel said. “If looking back across the history of art tells us anything, it’s that artists are in an ongoing conversation with each other and with their predecessors.”
Originally from Texas, Rauschenberg worked with a variety of mediums including photography, painting, printmaking and sculpture over the course of his career. Some of his most famous works even mix these media. In “Bed” (1955), Rauschenberg combines wooden frames, fabric and paint all on one canvas to recreate a bed.
“Robert Rauschenberg was, to me, a trailblazer in many ways,” Yi said. “He may not be a household name for most Americans…like somebody like Andy Warhol…but I always felt that Robert Rauschenberg belonged in a similar group.”
Kite’s section displays dyed animal hides geometrically embroidered with crystals and glass beads. Rocks found on Milwaukee’s lakefront are spread across the floor in the center of the gallery, also in a geometric fashion.
As an Oglála Lakȟóta artist, the exhibition holds respect for non-human beings, such as plant life, animal life, stone and minerals.
“I hope that our visitors, after engaging with the show, have a more expanded, improvisatory, experimental and daring attitude toward what human life encompasses and what is also encompassed in non-human life,” Nickel said.
“This Side of the Stars: Rauschenberg’s ‘Stoned Moon’ in the Company of Kite, Paglen, and Yi” is available for viewing until May 26. Click here to learn more about it.
This article was written by Annie Goode. She can be reached at [email protected].
