Arshile Gorky, "Dialogue of the Edge," circa 1946, oil on canvas, 32 1/16 x 41 1/8 in. Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Gift of Mari and James A. Michener, 1991.223 (© 2024 The Arshile Gorky Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York)

Austin’s Blanton Museum to Host ‘In Creative Harmony’ Exhibit Featuring Gorky

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AUSTIN, Texas — The Blanton Museum here will host “In creative Harmony: Three Artistic Partnerships,” starting on February 16, in which six artists’ works are paired in a three-part exhibit.  The pairs are Arshile Gorky and Isamu Noguchi; José Guadalupe Posada and Artemio Rodríguez and Nora Naranjo Morse and Eliza Naranjo Morse.

The exhibit will close on July 20.

No artist creates in isolation. Shared visual languages, techniques, and concerns shape artistic innovation.

“In Creative Harmony” explores the ways in which artists inspire each other by highlighting the relationships between three pairs of artists: inter-generational Mexican printmakers José Guadalupe Posada and Artemio Rodríguez; friends and innovators in abstract painting and sculpture Arshile Gorky and Isamu Noguchi; and Nora Naranjo Morse and her daughter Eliza Naranjo Morse, who will be creating new work together for the first time.

This three-part exhibition — each partnership organized by a different Blanton curator — reveals the diversity of connections and contexts that drive creativity.

Eliza Naranjo Morse, “Hurt,” 2018, watercolor and clay on paper, 10 x13 in. Courtesy of the artist

Arshile Gorky and Isamu Noguchi: Outside In

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From the late 1920s through the 1940s, painter Arshile Gorky (circa 1904–1948) and sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) developed their distinctive abstract vocabularies grounded in the natural world or evoking organic forms. Simultaneously, the artists established a friendship informed not only by their work, but also by a shared sense of otherness. The tension between “outside” and “inside” structured their stylistic synthesis of nature, memory, and myth, as well as their national and ethnic identities, resulting in highly personal visual languages.

Outside In reunites for the first time the three known collaborative drawings Gorky and Noguchi produced with De Hirsh Margules in 1939 in response to the outbreak of war in Europe. It will also present works shown by Gorky and Noguchi in landmark exhibitions of the 1940s but not seen together in over 70 years. These works ground Gorky and Noguchi in their historical moment—between Surrealism and the emerging New York School—and reveal the originality and impact of their visions.

Organized by Claire Howard, Associate Curator, Collections and Exhibitions, Blanton Museum of Art.

José Guadalupe Posada and Artemio Rodríguez: Calaveras y Corazones

Calaveras y Corazones explores a cross-generational conversation between two radical Mexican printmakers. Known as “The Mexican Goya,” José Guadalupe Posada (1852–1913) is also considered the father of modern Mexican printmaking. Inspired by Posada’s use of irony, satire, and caustic social critique as potent artistic strategies, Artemio Rodríguez (b. 1972) employs the same grim humor in works challenging contemporary social and political injustice.

Both Posada and Rodríguez depict imagined, sometimes apocalyptic, worlds where “all’s fair in love and war.” These two thematic throughlines connect their bodies of work with scenes of murderous skeletons and damsels in distress, often depicted as calaveras y corazones (“skulls and hearts/sweethearts”). This section will feature approximately 80 carefully chosen works, including many Posada prints drawn from Rodríguez’s personal collection and loans from esteemed institutions.

Nora Naranjo Morse and Eliza Naranjo Morse: Lifelong

For Lifelong, contemporary artists Nora Naranjo Morse (b. 1953) and Eliza Naranjo Morse (b. 1980), the mother-daughter descendants of a renowned artistic family of the Kha’p’o Owingeh (Santa Clara Pueblo, NM), are collectively creating an immersive environment. Together, they’ll merge their familial and personal artistic practices through artworks that center Indigenous ways of thinking about our relationship to the planet, the sacredness of life, and acts of creativity. Their new collaborative work is grounded in the materiality of their community, from the micaceous clay of Pueblo ceramicists to local found and recycled materials, all imbued with legacies of storytelling.

Working together at this scale for the first time, Nora and Eliza Naranjo Morse explore the deep roots of how materials and languages embody meaning, how images and forms narrate ancestral journeys and how art can help envision a better future for all of us.

Founded in 1963, the Blanton Museum of Art holds the largest public collection in Central Texas with more than 21,000 objects. Recognized as the home of Ellsworth Kelly’s Austin, its major collecting areas are modern and contemporary American and Latin American art, Italian Renaissance and Baroque paintings, and prints and drawings.

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