Canyon includes a taxidermied golden eagle and a pillow, along with other sculptural elements mounted on a painted and collaged canvas.

In Canyon, elements such as photographic images, fragments of clothing, and newspaper clippings are affixed to the surface either by paint, with string, or by other means.

[7] Before entering MoMA’s collection, Canyon was displayed intermittently at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, due to an earlier conflict between Sonnabend and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service over the piece.

Although MoMA ultimately received the work, the Met attempted to persuade Sonnabend's family to donate the piece to their institution.

The historian Kenneth Bendiner famously proposed Canyon as a playful recreation of a 1635 Rembrandt painting depicting a scene from Greek mythology, The Rape of Ganymede.

Other art historians, such as Branden Joseph, have argued that searching for iconography in Rauschenberg's Combines is useless because meaning can be made to exist anywhere.