PALM DESERT, CA.- Heather James Fine Art announced the installation of Periwinkle Shaft, seminal artist Robert Rauschenberg’s major five-piece installation. The installation takes up one entire gallery and includes five pieces, different in scope and dimensionality, representing Rauschenberg’s famous series Spreads. The public is invited to come and see this important piece of work.

Robert Rauschenberg is one of the icons firmly rooted in the pantheon of American art history. Challenging yet relevant, Rauschenberg is an artist that represents the best and most noteworthy of American art, coming to prominence when New York was the center of the art world, bridging the gap between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art.

One of Rauschenberg’s most prolific periods in his still active career was between 1975 and 1981 – the series known as the Spreads. Both literal and metaphorical in meaning the Spreads refer to the physical size of the works as well as the wide-open spaces of Texas where the artist grew up. The reference to the origins of the artist in this series is an important one, for the Spreads is where the artist returns to his roots: from materials and techniques - which call on his earlier combines, silkscreen paintings and photography - to again alternating between the simple and the complex, the formal and the experimental.

What makes Periwinkle Shaft such a monumental work is not just its size, but its mastery of narrative aesthetic and its ability to convey the joy that Rauschenberg brings to others through his work. It is the joy he finds in art – it is the joy that is art.

Commissioned in 1979 by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Periwinkle Shaft was a work that grew out of the Arts in Public Places Program (APP), a branch under the NEA’s Visual Arts Programs. Created in 1965, the National Endowment for the Arts was established to help support and foster artistic creativity and excellence and to make the results accessible for everyone to enjoy. The APP, which operated from 1967-1992, provided grants to turn public ideas for art into a reality and therefore made it possible for Rauschenberg to conceive and produce a work as ambitious as Periwinkle Shaft; although the choice of Rauschenberg for this grant was aided in no small part by his retrospective at the Smithsonian Institution in 1976.

Heather James Fine Art is located at 45-188 Portola Avenue in Palm Desert and will feature a wide array of art ranging from Impressionist and Modern art to Post-War and Contemporary, American, Latin American, Old Master, Photography and Design. The new Fine Art gallery is an expansion and evolution of the current Heather James Art & Antiquities, which continues to operate in the El Paseo location and provide clients with the finest in cultural antiquities and ethnographic art from all corners of the world.