Handle With Care: Robert Rauschenberg’s Ecological Conscience at The Grey Art Museum, New York, NY (September 9, 2025-April 11, 2026)

September 9, 2025-April 11, 2026

Handle With Care: Robert Rauschenberg’s Ecological Consience  explores the artist’s forays into environmental activism.  Convinced that “art can encourage individual conscience,” Rauschenberg turned to printmaking, an affordable, accessible, and duplicable medium with a longstanding connection to political activism. The artist started collaborating with print workshops in the late 1960s and quickly gained a reputation as a thoughtful, experimental printmaker. Drawn from the NYU Art Collection, the works on view coincide with the rise of the American environmental movement in the 1970s and similarly impart concern for vulnerable people, animals, and habitats, at home and abroad. A concurrent boom in the American print market also allowed Rauschenberg to fundraise for environmental and humanitarian causes by creating special edition prints with a range of sponsors.