Guild Hall Student Art Festival: Rauschenberg100 and Impressions Transferred: Lasting Legacies of Robert Rauschenberg, East Hampton, New York (November 16, 2025 – January 4, 2026)

The 2025 Student Art Festival: Rauschenberg100 celebrates the centennial of Robert Rauschenberg’s birth as part of an international initiative organized by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. A collaboration between eight East End public schools and ten regional artists, the exhibition explores what Rauschenberg described as the “gap between art and life,” embracing experimentation and chance through a wide range of materials and creative approaches. Participating schools include Amagansett School, Bridgehampton School, East Hampton High School, East Hampton Middle School, John Marshall Elementary School, Shelter Island Schoo, Springs School, and Pierson Middle-High School. Teaching guest artists include Linda K. Alpern, Scott Bluedorn, Peter Dayton, Eva Faye, Margaret Garrett, Candace Hill–Montgomery, Laurie Lambrecht,Bastienne Schmidt, Kevin Teare, and Evan Yee.

The Guild Hall Student Art Festival (SAF) is a beloved tradition that encourages and celebrates the artistic achievement and imagination of students, Kindergarten to Grade 12, on the South Fork of Long Island. Through close collaboration with schoolteachers and districts, the program explores an annual theme, partners each participating school with regional artists, produces an exhibition of new works, and links the tenets of creative production to civic participation.

On November 15th, the student exhibition’s opening day, Guild Hall hosts a special evening celebrating the release of I Don’t Think About Being Great (Yale University Press, 2024), a new book of writings by the artist Robert Rauschenberg and edited by the Foundation’s Director of Archives, Francine Snyder. While he was acclaimed for his diverse, six-decade career as an artist, his written work is less known and is published here for the first time. The program will be moderated by Francine Snyder and feature artists Scott Bluedorn and Evan Yee – Student Art Festival: Rauschenberg 100 artists and alumni of the Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva, who will share reflections on their time in residency and the ways in which Rauschenberg’s spirit of experimentation continues to inspire their work.

Impressions Transferred: Lasting Legacies of Robert Rauschenberg presents a selection of works from Guild Hall’s permanent collection, complemented by loans from friends, peers, and others closely connected to Rauschenberg and Guild Hall. Together, they celebrate his influence and legacy. The recently published book I Don’t Think About Being Great: Selected Writings, featuring reproductions of Rauschenberg’s handwritten notes, offers a compelling testament to his impact in his own words.