In Creative Harmony: Three Artistic Partnerships

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. 

One of the nine U.S. museum shows you shouldn’t miss in the first half of 2025.

CULTURED

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Arshile Gorky and Isamu Noguchi: Outside In

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.  

Organized by Vanessa Davidson, Curator of Latin American Art, Blanton Museum of Art 

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. 

Organized by Hannah Klemm, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Blanton Museum of Art