Blanton Museum Exhibition Reveals How Artists Spark Mutual Creativity
- Feb 20, 2025
The cross-curatorial exhibition “In Creative Harmony: Three Artistic Partnerships” opened recently at the Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin, delving into the relationships between three international pairs of artists to explore how human connection drives creativity.
“Artists have inspired one another for centuries,” said Blanton Museum Director Simone Wicha. “ ‘In Creative Harmony’ demonstrates how these exchanges push the boundaries of creativity by beautifully weaving together three transformative partnerships and more than a hundred artworks.”
- José Guadalupe Posada and Artemio Rodríguez: Calaveras y Corazones
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This pairing brings together the work of two masterful Mexican printmakers who never met, yet still engage in a vivid, visual dialogue across the span of a century.
Working in Mexico City at the turn of the 20th century, José Guadalupe Posada was known as the “Printmaker of the People” and the “Mexican Goya.” Living in the United States 1994-2008, Artemio Rodríguez embraced Posada’s foundational precedent as a bridge to Chicano artistic strategies of translating ideals of social justice into graphic form.
Both artists’ works employ caustic political critique and social satire while celebrating their respective communities’ popular tales and traditions.
- Arshile Gorky and Isamu Noguchi: Outside In
Friends and innovators in Surrealism and abstraction, painter Arshile Gorky and sculptor Isamu Noguchi were united by parallel creative trajectories and a shared sense of otherness.
Gorky, born in present-day Turkey, had lost his mother in the Armenian Genocide before immigrating to the U.S. Noguchi, born in Los Angeles and raised in Japan, voluntarily entered an internment camp during World War II.
Both artists moved to New York in the 1920s, meeting each other in the 1930s and exhibiting together in the 1940s. Each developed a signature abstract style whose highly original visual language made a profound impact on 20th-century American art.
- Nora Naranjo Morse and Eliza Naranjo Morse: Lifelong
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Nora Naranjo Morse, who works primarily in pottery, and her daughter Eliza Naranjo Morse, who works in drawings and graphic art, both come from a long lineage of Kha’ p’o artists belonging to a Tewa Speaking Pueblo community in Northern New Mexico.
Nora’s life-sized sculptures were inspired by traditional Tewa Pueblo pottery methods, and her burlap figures were created with locally found and recycled material. Eliza’s paintings depict anthropomorphized animals, inspired by her family, community and the popular culture she saw as a child.
At the Blanton, the pair collaborated to create an immersive environment that combines ancestral knowledge and familial storytelling with their contemporary global experiences.
This major exhibition, featuring artworks from the Blanton's collection along with loans and debut works, showcases a variety of media produced by the three pairs of artists.
A digital publication for each of the three artistic partnerships will be published online in April 2025, and specialized public programs will continue throughout the spring. “In Creative Harmony” will remain on view to the public through July 20, 2025.
