I Don't Think About Being Great: Selected Writings by Robert Rauschenberg
Francine Snyder of the Rauschenberg Foundation discusses her editorial work on a new Yale University Press collection of the artist's own writings, revealing his literary voice. Free.
Why we picked this
Rauschenberg changed what art could look like — and it turns out he also wrote. This talk reveals the literary dimension of one of postwar America's most restless minds, through the person who spent years in his archive assembling it.
Robert Rauschenberg is remembered as a visual artist — the combines, the silkscreens, the collaborations with Cage and Cunningham that remade postwar American art. Less known is the writing: essays, letters, artist statements, and notebooks that Yale University Press has now gathered in I Don’t Think About Being Great: Selected Writings by Robert Rauschenberg (2025). Francine Snyder, Director of Archives at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, edited the collection and comes to the Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery to discuss the process.
Snyder’s vantage point is unusual: she has spent years inside the archive, reading across Rauschenberg’s personal and professional papers, and her talk focuses on what the writing reveals about how the work was made. Artist statements from someone who routinely resisted interpretation. Letters that show the thinking behind apparently spontaneous gestures. The writing, Snyder argues, was central to Rauschenberg’s practice — not peripheral documentation but part of the same restless inquiry that drove the visual work.
Free to attend, this is the kind of event that reconfigures a canonical figure: not through new biographical revelations but through the quieter discovery of a voice most people didn’t know existed.