How Robert Rauschenberg created the first artwork for Earth Day

Robert Rauschenberg had a utopian vision of the future, one where artists and scientists would come together and stretch their imaginations to effect radical change. The restless innovator, celebrated for his unruly experiments in abstraction using the commonplace materials of everyday life, often took the path least travelled. During the optimism of the 1960s, as Pop artists celebrated the benefits of mass production and minimalists sought an equilibrium, Rauschenberg, with remarkable foresight, sensed the coming climate crisis and turned his attention to how it should best be confronted.

Born and raised in the gritty industrial zone of Port Arthur, Texas, the artist was all too aware of the havoc caused by unremitting pollution. The sprawling oil town lies between the bayou and Sabine Lake and is dominated by hulking refineries. Above lick the flaming tongues of fossil fuel distillation, while below, shimmering on the sea’s surface, is the evidence of chemical overspill. Everything, Rauschenberg recalled of his childhood, was coated in an oily iridescence.

Boating trips out to the bayou with his family revealed the steep degradation of the wetlands and the decimation of the wildlife population. For an animal lover — Rauschenberg kept something of a menagerie at home — these early experiences of ecological destruction were deeply affecting.

They remained with him and were harnessed at Black Mountain College, the famously experimental institution in North Carolina where Rauschenberg met pioneers of the burgeoning environmental movement. Among them were the architect Buckminster Fuller, a prophet of sustainable development, and the composer John Cage, a keen advocate of Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden — a hymn to the natural world and spiritual liberation.

Rauschenberg’s early environmental artworks, such as his ‘Elemental’ series, focused on individual responsibility: the artist filled wooden boxes with mud and seeds and hung them on the gallery wall. Each box needed to be watered regularly. ‘They were about looking and caring,’ he said. ‘Those pieces would literally die if you didn’t water them.’

By the late 1950s, the artist was making headlines with his ‘Combines’: incongruous assemblages that reflected the awkward relationship between the natural and the manmade world, perhaps most famously in Monogram (1955-56), in which he encircled a stuffed goat with a rubber tyre.

As the 1960s progressed, it became clear to Rauschenberg that the oil slicks in the ocean, the exhaust fumes in the atmosphere and the soot collecting on the windowsills were not something that could just be cleansed away: society needed a re-education.

In 1970, a Wisconsin senator called Gaylord Nelson approached Rauschenberg with a proposal for a national teaching event about the environment. It was to be called Earth Day, and it would be held on 22 April. The artist agreed to create an artwork to benefit the initiative. It featured an endangered American bald eagle surrounded by pollutants: rusted-out junkyards, toxic refuse, decimated forests and billowing smog. In keeping with Earth Day’s spirit of protest, Rauschenberg designed the work to look like a flyer tacked onto a wall during a demonstration.

Some 20 million people participated in that first event, and Earth Day is now observed by more than a billion people worldwide. Its success focused Rauschenberg’s thinking. Soon after, he established a natural habitat on Captiva Island, Florida, and turned his practice to works that reflected the out-of-sync relationship between natural resources and market forces. ‘Gluts’, a series of wall reliefs made out of scavenged detritus found in Texas during an economic recession, is a typical example.

He also established not-for-profit organisations focused on technology, human rights and the environment, and devised interdisciplinary projects that reflected his faith in the capacity of art to change society. He collaborated, for example, with Saff Tech Arts on artworks that promoted sustainable wind power.

Rauschenberg commemorated Earth Day in 1990 with a 20th-anniversary screenprint collage featuring a blackened tree and a miasma of toxic-looking smog. In 1992, the artist was invited to speak at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro. He called for everyone to take responsibility for their planet.

‘Once the individual has changed, the world can change,’ he said. To support his argument, he presented Last Turn—Your Turn, an apocalyptic lithograph of fiery red streaks and industrial blues and greens on which he had written: ‘I pledge to make the Earth a secure and hospitable home for present and future generations.’

Towards the end of his life, Rauschenberg was asked if his art had a message. ‘It’s hard for me not to build in a lesson, because I care so much about technology and the environment,’ he said. ‘We’re really going to be lost if we don’t come to terms.’

Throughout 2025, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation will commemorate Robert Rauschenberg’s 100th birthday with an international celebration of the artist’s expansive creativity, spirit of curiosity and commitment to change

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