Throughout 2025, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation is celebrating the centennial of the artist’s birth through activities and exhibitions around the world. To commemorate the year, NOMA invited three New Orleans–based artists to share their own personal reflections on Rauschenberg’s legacy and discoveries in the 1979 work Melic Meeting (Spread), on view in the museum’s second-floor modern art galleries.
Robert Rauschenberg (American, 1925–2008), Melic Meeting (Spread), 1979, Solvent transfer, acrylic, fabric, and collage on wood panels with mirror, Gift of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, partial gift in honor of Dora Rauschenberg, and Museum purchase with funds provided by The Helis Foundation, 2013.20
“Rauschenberg expanded not only the boundaries of the readymade but also showed us how to work through everyday objects and materials to re-contextualize a visual language of our own. At a pivotal moment in American culture, he invited viewers to collapse hierarchical thinking about materials and offered a perspective that I see as still resonant today. For me, pieces like Melic Meeting’s use of floral bedsheets, transfer images and household objects resonate as a quiet song of subversive love within domestic landscapes.”
—Artist Ryan Leitner, who participated in a 2024 panel discussion at the museum titled “Monuments and Memorials to Queer History”
“Robert Rauschenberg understood the role of the artist as a truth teller, responsible for the expansion of realms. His work expands multiple mediums and blends the magic of the world we experience with the mundane of classical artmaking. In his landmark series of Combines (1954–64) he mixed the materials of artmaking with ordinary things, writing, ‘I consider the text of a newspaper, the detail of photograph, the stitch in a baseball, and the filament in a light bulb as fundamental to the painting as brush stroke or enamel drip of paint.’ I resonate with his intention to act as a bridge between social change and creativity through use of found materials and his exploration of the boundaries between art and life.”
—LaVonna Varnado Brown, current Creative Assembly resident artist at NOMA
“As someone who visits NOMA on an almost weekly basis, I have stood in front of Robert Rauschenberg’s Melic Meeting (Spread) at least fifty times over the years. The piece unfolds in four movements and I like to think of them as four notes of a chord that would go something like ‘dun dun dun, dun’; a common musical phrase used for dramatic effect. The title of the work is, after all, telling us to sing the work.
Melic Meeting brings me a great deal of joy and if I’m honest, no small part of that is the blue point siamese cat staring at you when you look at the artwork. Rauschenberg is a mythic figure in the art world, but his artwork comes from a place of deep thinking about humanity.”
Melic Meeting brings me joy because it points to a story of queer love, psychic breaks, artistic endurance, and the triumph of idea over object. But to really appreciate it, you have to go back to Rauschenberg’s White Paintings, whose banality may seem like the antithesis of Melic Meeting, but I think of them as a work of conceptual art that is trying to get us to think about how we look at art. Rauschenberg wanted us to look at the White Paintings as a stage that was as informed by the room and their viewers as they were by the housepaint that made them. If we apply that thinking to Melic Meeting, the cat becomes a mirror and the title becomes a word play about the gathering of sounds, ours and his.”
—Artist and writer Ric Kasini Kadour, who is the organizer of Kolaj Fest New Orleans, which recently hosted a day of activities at NOMA in June 2025