Artist Sari Dienes had a studio in the Sherwood Studio Lofts in Midtown, just a few doors away from Betty Parsons Gallery, where both she and Rauschenberg had their earliest exhibitions. This photograph was taken before Dienes left for an extended stay in California in 1955, perhaps at a party after one of her shows at the Parsons Gallery. Though Johns and Rauschenberg had met the previous year, it was Dienes who reacquainted them at one of her famous loft parties in 1954. Later Rauschenberg and Johns, working together under the pseudonym "Matson Jones" to design store windows, included Dienes’s rubbings as the backdrop in a Bonwit Teller display.