From the very beginning of his mad, ecstatic, always-experimenting career, Robert Rauschenberg was looking at photographs. His hungry eye absorbed them; then they reappeared in his paintings, sculptures, and prints, and especially in his combines—the new form he invented, neither painting nor sculpture but a visual-material manifestation of abstract poetry. Rauschenberg appropriated photos from books, newspapers, magazines, advertisements, other artists, art-history books, anyplace. He cut them up, used them whole, pieced them back together, whatever. Given his fecundity—and a spate of pesky copyright cases brought against him—it’s no surprise to learn he also took pictures himself. Lots of them.

Last March, the “New York Times” lamented in a commentary from David Pogue the demise of the sounds of the analog age. That scratching of a record as the needle leaves the vinyl, signaling the end of an album; the fast forward/rewind screeching zip-zip of a tape; the busy tone of a telephone; the “ka-ching” of a cash register. For the most part, none exist anymore.

So it’s the sound when entering George Sanchez-Calderon’s installation room at the de la Cruz Collection that feels the most immediate: it’s the click, click, click, flip, flip, flip of a train station sign changing times and destinations. The sound emanates from a real, giant Solari train station mechanism and is immediately recognizable to anyone (as in most of the world) who has traveled on trains. It is immediately identifiable as old-fashioned. The aural and visual aspect of the piece is also immediately nostalgic. Today, there are similar signs in airports, flashing updated times and gates, prompting a rush to new exit points — but they are silent. The digital age has left us mute without these telltale cues, which once became synonymous with “Modernism” and are now dated. Funny, isn’t it?

Sanchez-Calderon, whose quirky and engaging works have invigorated the Miami landscape for years, played with the idea of Modernism— its contradictions and its after effects — on a number of previous occasions. For instance, he erected an 80-percent-scale version of Le Corbusier’s classic Modernist house under a freeway overpass in Overtown, which stood for several years back in the early 2000s. On the one hand, here was a representative of “progress” as the Modern age once heralded, sitting in one of the most decrepit and neglected areas of any modern city in the world. As an artist, he is interested in both the literal and metaphorical architecture of our current era.

For his latest installation, called “The Family of Man” (a name appropriated from a mid-century MOMA exhibit from Edward Steichen), the big black-and-white sign flips and clicks, to tell us a new destination, a new time. On opening night, it included lots of repetitions of places, such as Providence (R.I.), and the same times, such as 6:66. Then, names of our corporate masters took the place of the “destination:” Wells Fargo, Merrill Lynch, Moody’s. Where, indeed, are we going?

 “I began to look for and found a Solari sign in early 2009, shortly after the September market crash of ’08,” says Sanchez-Calderon about the inspiration. “An analog device that marked this transition, a marker of sorts for Modernism.” The work will change throughout the month or so that it is up. “It only gets better,” says the artist.

“The Family of Man” site-specific installation, through Oct. 8, at the de la Cruz Collection, 23 N.E. 41st St., Miami; www.delacruzcollection.org.

Although he currently lives and works in Chicago, Illinois, his time spent in Watts, Los Angeles, California where he observed the Black Power and Civil Rights movements had a significant impact on his paintings). Strongly influenced by his experiences as a young man, he developed a signature style during his early years as an artist that involved the use of extremely dark, essentially black figures. These images represent his perspective of African Americans with separate and distinct inner and outer appearances. At the same time, they confront racial stereotypes within contemporary American society.This common theme appeared continuously in his work throughout the subsequent decades, especially in the 1980's and 1990's.

While earning his BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, he worked under the notable Charles White and Arnold Mesches. At Otis, he developed his realist style after experimenting with large-scale drawings and collage, choosing instead to “mak[e] a meaningful picture that did not have a representational image or a specific story to tell,” over abstraction. Thus, Marshall still retains the political content so important to the Civil Rights Movement while painting a narrative through mural-sized pieces.