The Lyman Allyn Art Museum is currently hosting "Robert Rauschenberg: Ruminations," an exhibition that features a series of nine large prints, composed with fragments of multiple images of important figures and events from Rauschenberg’s young life. The show is on view through Aug. 11.

During a career that spanned more than five decades, Rauschenberg (1925-2008) reshaped art in the 20th century, ushering in a new era of postwar American art. In 1964, he became the first American and youngest artist to win the prestigious Venice Biennale Grand Prize. He was also the first living American artist to be featured by Time Magazine on its cover.

When Rauschenberg launched his career in the early 1950s, the heroic gestural painting of Abstract Expressionism was in its heyday. He challenged this tradition with an egalitarian approach to materials, bringing the stuff of the everyday world into his art. Often working in collaboration with artists, dancers, musicians, and writers, he invented new interdisciplinary modes of artistic practice that helped set the course for art of the present day. Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters and Joseph Cornell, he produced groundbreaking work with photography, mass media, and technology. The term Neo-Dada was applied to Rauschenberg's early work and that of Jasper Johns and Allan Kaprow, as they initiated a radical shift in the focus of modern art during the 1950's similar to that of the Dada movement in the first decade of the 20

The museum, located at 625 Williams St. in New London, is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.-Sat. and 1-5 p.m. Sun. For more information, call (860) 443-2545, ext. 2129, or visit www.lymanallyn.org.