Exhibition Review: “In Creative Harmony” at the Blanton Museum of Art

Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.

One show I need to shut up about is 2023’s “Manet/Degas” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I went to see it many, many times because there always seemed to be something new to discover. The depth of existentialism in The Dead Toreador (1864). The fantasy city in the background of Young Woman with Ibis (1857-58). But there was also the curation. You saw how these two geniuses had so much in common and drove each other to new heights of skill, like rivals in a movie by Michael Mann.

A new show at the Blanton Museum of Art (for which I have done work on a contract basis) seeks to achieve something similar. “In Creative Harmony: Three Artistic Partnerships” examines the professional kinships between José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913) and Artemio Rodríguez (b. 1972), Arshile Gorky (c.1904-1948) and Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988), and Nora Naranjo Morse (b. 1953) and Eliza Naranjo Morse (b. 1980). Spanning decades, geographies and mediums, this ambitious exhibition plumbs the origins of inspiration.

SEE ALSO: Revisiting the Edgeless and All-Encompassing Art of Helen Frankenthaler

The first pairing between Posada and Rodríguez is the most distant one. Posada was “the Mexican Goya,” and he lived in Mexico City through to the Mexican Revolution of 1911. He was responsible for at least sixteen hundred printed images, though some claim that he made as many as twenty thousand prints during his career. He was responsible for popularizing the Day of the Dead skeleton for political and cultural commentary, and Rodríguez worked in the motif to similar ends for the years lived in America, 1994 to 2008. These were the years, of course, that America took its nosedive. His skeleton banquet Noche infinita (2004) feels prescient of the long night that has defined the country since that time.

Gorky and Noguchi were friends and contemporaries in New York, each experimenting with Surrealist-inspired biometric abstraction. Noguchi’s Leda (1928) has both the curving body of a plump creature and also a Saturn-like ring. It undulates in aluminum bronze, with pegs that don’t puncture its body or throw off its hula-hooping balance. This is a self-confident little guy. It pairs well with Gorky’s Mojave (1941–42), which positions a range of similar characters across a landscape—the Leda extended universe, if you will.

The Morses are a mother-daughter pairing of artists working in the tradition of the Kha’ p’o, a Tewa-speaking Pueblo community in Northern New Mexico. Nora, the mother, works in ceramics while Eliza works in drawing and graphic arts. Nora’s figures are mysterious humanoids with titles like We Come With Stories (2024), poised to topple over in their plentitude. Eliza’s work is melodramatic, an illustration perhaps of those stories, told with anthropomorphized animals. They’re tapping into the same well, but with buckets of a very different shape.

But that’s the point of this exhibition: to show how two artists with similar goals can come to completely different conclusions. These pairings are well chosen, demonstrating the way artists can motivate, inspire and deepen each other’s work.

“In Creative Harmony: Three Artistic Partnerships” is on view at the Blanton Museum of Art through July 20, 2025.