Either of the Weisman Art Museum's new shows would make a trip to the museum worthwhile; the prospect of seeing them both at the same time makes it a no-brainer. The splashiest of the two is "Au Courant: Robert Rauschenberg's 'Currents,' " and it's a stunner.

The centerpiece is a gigantic, 54-foot-long silkscreen print by the legendary artist, on loan from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts' collection. (Museum staffers actually had to add a few feet to the gallery wall to display the piece in full.)

"Currents" is a frenetic collage of headlines, images, ads and article copy, from a period of just a few weeks in 1969, drawn from material run in Los Angeles, New York and Minneapolis newspapers. Rauschenberg created this series of collage prints during an eight-month period in 1969-70 for Gallery 12, at the time an ambitious contemporary art gallery housed on the 12th floor of the downtown Minneapolis Dayton's department store.

Curator Diane Mullin says, "What's striking about this is how much of the news Rauschenberg was focusing on is still relevant: terrorism, violence in the Arab world, gay rights. So much of what he was picking up on is still in the news today."

Looking through Rauschenberg's prints, it hit me that such a piece simply couldn't be made now; Rauschenberg's visual commentary is intrinsically tied to the idea of newspapers as the stalwart center of mass communication. Such a thing just isn't germane any more; these days, no single centralized part of the media has the undisputed gravitas that the big-city newspapers once held. The fading influence of print gives the exhibition a certain additional historical poignancy.

But at the time, Rauschenberg's decision to make newspapers his medium of choice for his "drawings" — cutting the paper, printing over it, and re-arranging its elements into something new — was a revolutionary idea.

Mullin says, "Today, we think nothing of this sort of collage — even in school, kids do it all the time. But you have to remember that when Rauschenberg created 'Currents,' this sort of appropriation of media was a brand new idea — this was before Warhol was well known, before Richard Prince. Rauschenberg's use of collage was just unprecedented."

"Currents" is accompanied in the "Au Courant" exhibition by a portfolio of 26 satellite prints, "Features from 'Currents' "; these smaller pieces, which the Weisman owns, reproduce constituent panels from the larger work.

Seeing the prints together is an immersive experience; you're bombarded with a barrage of cryptic, eye-catching images and text as you tour the gallery. Headlined brawls and riots are side by side with weather reports, a gas-masked mother and child out for a stroller ride; images of both starvation and wealth, John-John and Jackie Kennedy are cheek by jowl with ads for underwear and car sales. It's both exhilarating and exhausting to try to decipher Rauschenberg's coded meanings in the rearrangements.

Photos show Somali immigrants in Minneapolis, 2 other cities
And in the next gallery over, you'll find the second of the Weisman's new shows: selections from Abdi Roble's years-long photography project documenting the "Stories of the Somali Diaspora" in America's three largest communities of Somali immigrants -- in Minneapolis; Columbus, Ohio; and Portland, Maine. One series of photographs documents the arduous journey of one displaced Somali family from the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya to a port in California, and ultimately to resettlement in their new home in Maine. The images are quiet but powerful testimony to the universality of these Somali families' quest to reclaim normalcy and the comforts of home in the wake of violent displacement.

Weisman staffer Christopher James calls the photography exhibition's central mission "partly archival and partly educational." James says, "Roble definitely wants to document this historical moment where Somalis are making new homes so far from their native country; in that sense, much of what he's doing is pure photojournalism." But another motivation behind the project is to educate people in the United States about Somali culture and people; as James says, "Roble wants to help introduce Americans living in these cities to their new neighbors."

"Au Courant: Robert Rauschenberg's 'Currents' " will be on display at the Weisman through Oct. 4. (Visit the Weisman's website for information on related exhibition events.) "Stories of the Somali Diaspora: Photographs by Abdi Roble" will be exhibited at the Weisman through Sept. 27.