2024
Anni Albers: In Thread and On Paper
February 11, 2024 – June 30, 2024
This presentation highlighted how nimbly Albers moved between mediums—including her shift from weaving to printmaking in the 1960s—and transitioned between making art and designing functional and commercial objects.
The Floating World: Masterpieces of Edo Japan from the Worcester Art Museum
February 11, 2024 – June 30, 2024
A presentation of more than 130 woodblock prints and painted scrolls from one of history’s most vibrant artistic eras.
Unbreakable: Feminist Visions from the Gilberto Cárdenas and Dolores Garcia Collection
September 16, 2023 – April 7, 2024
Unbreakable presents artworks with an emphasis on Latina and Chicana artists and their stories of survival and resilience.
If the Sky Were Orange: Art in the Time of Climate Change
September 9, 2023 – February 11, 2024
This special two-part exhibition explores the history and contemporary urgency of climate-related issues. Guest curated by journalist Jeff Goodell, who has written extensively on the topic, If the Sky Were Orange was the first exhibition at the Blanton to explore one topic across several of the museum’s temporary gallery spaces.
Forces of Nature: Ancient Maya Art from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
August 27, 2023 – January 7, 2024
This exhibition explores the rich world of the supernatural in ancient Maya art, through 200 works from LACMA’s notable collection — including ceramic vessels and figurines, and greenstone jewelry from present-day Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras.
Weird Winter
December 9, 2023 – January 7, 2024
Weird Winter by Austin-based artist Steve Parker was a joyful, offbeat holiday-inspired display in two spaces at the Blanton.
2023
Cara a cara / Face to Face: Portraits by Chicano Artists from the Gilberto Cárdenas and Dolores Garcia Collection
March 25 – September 10, 2023
Cara a cara / Face to Face is the first presentation in the Blanton’s Latino art galleries, which celebrate the Gilberto Cárdenas and Dolores Garcia Collection, one of most important collections of Chicano and Latino art in the world.
Recent Acquisitions in Contemporary Art
July 22 – August 27, 2023
Day Jobs
February 19 – July 23, 2023
Day Jobs, the first major exhibition to examine the overlooked impact of day jobs on the visual arts, is dedicated to demystifying artistic production and upending the stubborn myth of the artist sequestered in their studio, waiting for inspiration to strike.
VLM (Virginia L. Montgomery)
December 17, 2022 – August 27, 2023
VLM’s work is more easily experienced than described. Her installations aim to fully engage the viewer’s senses with captivating visuals and ASMR-like sound recordings. Whether interrogating the absurdities of creative labor or raising familiars like her moths to intervene on behalf of climate justice, VLM and her exquisitely-crafted worlds refute the limitations of the present and propose creative solutions for the future.
Las Hermanas Iglesias
December 17, 2022 – July 9, 2023
Las Hermanas Iglesias debuts work that draws on the sisters’ own navigations of fertility, pregnancy, loss, and birth. Both gave birth during the COVID-19 pandemic when parenting-related concerns, including essential labor, healthcare access, childcare costs, paid leave, and reproductive justice, came to the fore.
Medieval X Modern
December 10, 2022 – August 27, 2023
Drawing primarily from the Blanton’s collection, Medieval X Modern offers a wide array of artistic responses to the European Middle Ages, including one of the museum’s most iconic works—Ellsworth Kelly’s Austin.
2022
Painted Cloth: Fashion and Ritual in Colonial Latin America
August 14, 2022 – January 8, 2023
Painted Cloth: Fashion and Ritual in Colonial Latin America addresses the social roles of textiles and their visual representations in different media produced in Bolivia, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela during the 1600s and 1700s.
Njideka Akunyuli Crosby
July 23, 2022 – December 4, 2022
Nigerian-born, Los Angeles-based artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby has described her desire as an artist to “center Black life, my experience as a Black woman, and the complexity of Black life—and to infuse every piece I make with…this deep love I have for my Black experience.”
Ellsworth Kelly: Postcards
August 27 – November 27, 2022
From 1949 to 2005, Kelly made just over 400 postcard works. They show a playful, unbounded space of creative freedom for the artist and provide an important insight into the way Kelly saw, experienced, and translated the world in his art.
Assembly: New Acquisitions by Contemporary Black Artists
December 11, 2021 – September 4, 2022
This installation celebrates major acquisitions made possible by funds from an anonymous donor to purchase work by contemporary Black artists based in the United States.
Fantastically French! Design and Architecture in 16th- to 18th-Century Prints
March 05, 2022 – August 14, 2022
From arabesques to grotesques and from sphinxes to snails, French printmakers combined ancient decorative motifs with newly invented ones to create designs for everything from jewelry to architectural façades.
Terry Allen: MemWars
December 18, 2021 – July 10, 2022
Terry Allen presents a three-channel video installation and a related group of drawings, all part of the same series titled MemWars. The video presents Allen, with his wife and frequent collaborator, artist and actress Jo Harvey Allen, performing autobiographical dialogues to introduce related songs.
Oscar Muñoz: Invisibilia
February 20, 2022 – June 05, 2022
Oscar Muñoz: Invisibilia is the first retrospective of this Colombian artist’s work in the United States. Since the late 1980s, Muñoz has sought to reinvent the medium of photography through non-traditional materials and techniques.
2021
Without Limits: Helen Frankenthaler, Abstraction, and the Language of Print
September 04, 2021 – February 20, 2022
In 1952, Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) transformed abstract art with her first soak-stained painting, Mountains and Sea, which she made by pouring and brushing thinned out oil paint over raw canvas placed on the floor. Her deliberate movements from above resulted in abstract works that seem both intentional and spontaneous. A key figure in the development of color-field painting, she was a tireless experimenter with color, form, and technique over the course of her life.
Pop Crítico/Political Pop: Expressive Figuration in the Americas, 1960s-1980s
October 31, 2021 – January 16, 2022
In the 1960s Pop art in the Americas took a turn to the dark side. Artists working in both the United States and Latin America increasingly manipulated Pop’s colorful and flashy representation of the familiar into a tool for social and political critique…
Border Vision: Luis Jiménez’s Southwest
October 31, 2021 – January 16, 2022
Luis Jiménez lived most of his life in the American Southwest. Born in 1940 and raised in El Paso, Texas, he later settled in New Mexico, where he died in 2006. This area of the U.S., so near the border with Mexico, helped shape Jiménez’s artistic vision and his unique rasquache – or “underdog”– flair. Border Vision: Luis Jiménez’s Southwest explores his insightful and critical perspective on this region by focusing on key themes in his art…
Sedrick Huckaby
May 29 – December 5, 2021
“The African-American family and its heritage has been the content of my work for several years. In large-scale portraits of family and friends I try to aggrandize ordinary people by painting them on a monumental scale.” Fort Worth, Texas-based artist Sedrick Huckaby explores psychology, community, and the human condition in his powerful portraits painted from life.
Suzanne Bocanegra: Valley
June 27 – September 19, 2021
Suzanne Bocanegra’s immersive video installation Valley (2018) presents eight women artists reenacting Judy Garland’s wardrobe test for the 1967 cult film Valley of the Dolls. Garland’s casting as a lead in the story of three women undone by drugs and show business was brief; suffering from addiction herself and reputedly unpredictable, Garland …
Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite
June 27 – September 19, 2021
In the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, Kwame Brathwaite (born Brooklyn, New York, 1938) used photography to popularize the political slogan “Black Is Beautiful.” This exhibition—the first ever dedicated to Brathwaite’s remarkable career—tells the story of a key figure of the second Harlem Renaissance. Inspired by the writings of activist and …
Drawn: From the Collection of Jack Shear
March 27 – August 22, 2021
Jack Shear has long had an interest in how artists collect the work of other artists. In 1999 he co-organized an exhibition on this topic at New York’s Drawing Center, Drawn from Artist’s Collections. A deeply curious collector with an interest in many types of art, he has recently focused much of his attention …
After Michelangelo, Past Picasso: Leo Steinberg’s Library of Prints
February 7 – May 9, 2021
Leo Steinberg was the rare art historian who turned his inquisitive eye and captivating prose to both Renaissance and modern art. His astonishingly wide-ranging scholarship addresses such canonical artists as Michelangelo Buonarroti, Leonardo da Vinci, Peter Paul Rubens, Pablo Picasso, and Jasper Johns. While Steinberg’s significance to the field of art history is …
2020
Off the Walls: Gifts from Professor John A. Robertson
November 8, 2020 – March 14, 2021
How does someone build an art collection? For John A. Robertson (1943–2017), a renowned bioethics scholar and distinguished professor at The University of Texas at Austin School of Law, the process was both dynamic and highly personal. Robertson’s wide-ranging collection of modern and contemporary works on paper, nurtured by his own passion for …
Diedrick Brackens: darling divined
October 17, 2020 – May 16, 2021
Diedrick Brackens constructs intricately woven textiles that speak to the complexities of Black and queer identity in the United States. Interlacing diverse traditions, including West African weaving, European tapestries, and quilting from the American south, Brackens creates cosmographic abstractions and figurative narratives that lyrically merge lived experience, commemoration, and allegory. He uses both …
Expanding Abstraction: Pushing the Boundaries of Painting in the Americas, 1958–1983
October 4, 2020 – January 10, 2021
In the early 20th century, artists began exploring abstract, nonrepresentational forms for the first time and significantly changed the language of painting. Several decades later, abstraction continued to evolve robustly, as its practitioners experimented with new materials and techniques. Dripping, pouring, staining and even slinging paint became common, as did the use of …
The Avant-garde Networks of Amauta: Argentina, Mexico, and Peru in the 1920s
February 16 – August 30, 2020
The 1920s were a period of rapid modernization and artistic innovation across the globe; magazines played an integral role in disseminating bold new ideas and movements. The Avant-Garde Networks of Amauta: Argentina, Mexico, and Peru in the 1920s explores this history in Latin America through the magazine Amauta, published in Peru from 1926 to 1930. With …
Ed Ruscha: Drum Skins
January 11 – October 4, 2020
Ed Ruscha: Drum Skins debuts a new body of more than a dozen round paintings made between 2017 and 2019 by the pioneering American artist known for his use of language. The presentation features text Ruscha painted on found drumheads that he has collected over the past forty years. Informed by memories of …
2019
Wael Shawky: Cabaret Crusades III: The Secrets of Karbala
December 21, 2019 – April 19, 2020
The Blanton will screen the third and final installment of Egyptian artist Wael Shawky’s widely-acclaimed series Cabaret Crusades, his epic exploration of the religious wars fought in the Medieval period. Cabaret Crusades III: The Secrets of Karbala (2014) is, like all three works in the trilogy, based on the 1983 book The Crusades …
The Artist at Work
December 14, 2019 – October 25, 2020
Artists have long created images of themselves engaged in art-making in order to elevate their social status and establish their cultural importance. Whether in grand self-portraits, views of studios and art academies, or depictions of outdoor sketching expeditions, artists frequently cast themselves as their primary subject. Showcasing representations of artists at work from …
Medieval Monsters: Terrors, Aliens, Wonders
October 27, 2019 – January 12, 2020
From griffins and giants to demons and dragons, monsters have enthralled people throughout time. In medieval art and literature, these fanciful creatures give form to fears, curiosities, and fantasies of the unfamiliar and the unknown. Medieval Monsters, organized by the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, will present a lively array of monsters that appear in more than …
Arte Sin Fronteras: Prints from the Self Help Graphics Studio
October 27, 2019 – January 12, 2020
This exhibition focuses on a gift from Dr. Gilberto Cárdenas, a leading collector of Latinx art, of prints produced at Self Help Graphics and Art. Located in East Los Angeles, this printmaking workshop and cultural institution has been a mainstay in the city’s arts community since 1972. Sister Karen Boccalero and two Mexican-born …
Joiri Minaya: Labadee
September 14 – December 8, 2019
Joiri Minaya’s video Labadee explores the social and economic dynamics at play in Labadee, Haiti, on a private beach leased to Royal Caribbean cruise lines until 2050. Connecting the Caribbean tourism industry with the legacy of invasion and colonization, the video begins with passages from Christopher Columbus’s diary recounting his arrival in the …
Charles White: Celebrating the Gordon Gift
September 7 – December 1, 2019
The University of Texas at Austin is honored to be the home of twenty-three works by Charles White, one of the 20th century’s most accomplished draftsmen and influential art educators. This exhibition celebrates the artist’s remarkable career and legacy, made possible by the generous gift of artworks from Drs. Susan G. and Edmund …
Lily Cox-Richard: She-Wolf + Lower Figs.
July 27 – December 29, 2019
Sculptor Lily Cox-Richard presents new work that responds to the history and materiality of the Blanton’s William J. Battle Collection of Plaster Casts, a set of nineteenth-century replicas of ancient Greek and Roman sculptures and one of the few remaining collections of this kind in the United States. Such casts were once an integral …
Jeffrey Gibson: This is the Day
July 14 – September 29, 2019
Jeffrey Gibson: This Is the Day is a vibrant, celebratory exhibition in which the artist brings together his Choctaw and Cherokee heritage and a range of diverse artistic and cultural influences to explore race, sexuality, religion, and gender. More than 50 works made between 2014 and 2018 include intricately beaded wall hangings and …
Mapping Memory: Space and History in 16th-century Mexico
June 29 – August 25, 2019
Exactly 500 years ago, in August of 1519, an expedition led by the Spanish explorer Hernando Cortés began marching inland into Mexican territory. Just two years later, what today is Mexico City fell to an ethnically diverse army composed of both Spanish and local peoples from other cities, starting a long period of …
Jeremy Blake: Winchester Trilogy
June 8 – September 1, 2019
Jeremy Blake’s haunting Winchester trilogy explores the history of the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. In the late 1800s, Sarah Winchester, heiress of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, began to turn her eight-bedroom home into a sprawling mansion. Over the course of thirty-six years, Winchester hired construction workers to continually build …
Copies, Fakes, and Reproductions: Printmaking in the Renaissance
March 23 – June 16, 2019
Artistic training in the Renaissance involved drawing, or copying, from nature, from antique sculptures and from the work of other acclaimed artists. While Raphael and Michelangelo were painting for the Popes in Rome, skilled printmakers such as Marcantonio Raimondi and Giorgio Ghisi were widely disseminating the painters’ famous compositions through the relatively new …
The Propeller Group: The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music
March 8 – May 26, 2019
This film by The Propeller Group, an artist collective based in Vietnam and California, combines actual footage and staged portrayals of Vietnamese funeral rituals that shift dramatically from documentary to poetic. Music plays a significant role in the narrative trajectory, beginning with Vietnamese instrumentation and concluding with a New Orleans-style brass band, establishing …
Words/Matter: Latin American Art and Language at the Blanton
February 17 – May 26, 2019
Drawn primarily from the Blanton’s extensive collection of Latin American art, Words/Matter offers an innovative perspective on how artists of this region have explored the links between visual art and written language since the early decades of the twentieth century. Words/Matter explores key moments in the artistic fascination with the written word, ranging …
Kambui Olujimi: Zulu Time
January 26 – July 14, 2019
The Blanton Museum of Art presents a solo exhibition of new work by Kambui Olujimi, a Brooklyn native whose multi-disciplinary practice calls attention to the assumptions that underlie our understanding of the world at large. In Kambui Olujimi: Zulu Time, the artist explores, among other concerns, the interlocking systems of power and invisible hierarchies …
2018
Ideas in Sensuous Form: The international Symbolist Movement
December 15, 2018 – March 10, 2019
The Symbolist movement spanned European nations and creative genres in the final decades of the nineteenth century. First writers, then visual artists, sought to “clothe the idea in sensuous form,” as Jean Moréas wrote in his 1886 Symbolist manifesto. More a sensibility than a single artistic style, Symbolism evoked feeling, meaning, and intangible …
Liliana Porter
December 8, 2018 – February 24, 2019
In the video Drum Solo [Solo de Tambor] (2000; 19 min) Liliana Porter brings to life a cast of recurrent toy-like characters that have appeared in her artworks over the years. Through straight-forward animation and accompanied by a music score by Sylvia Meyer, vintage figurines perform in humorous, absurd, and sometimes moving vignettes. Porter’s installation Labor forzada [Forced …
Making Africa: A Continent of Contemporary Design
October 14, 2018 – January 6, 2019
Making Africa: A Continent of Contemporary Design showcases the work of over 120 artists and designers and illustrates how African design accompanies and fuels economic, social, and political change in the continent. Through sculpture, prints, fashion, furniture, film, photography, apps, maps, digital comics, and more, the exhibition presents Africa as a hub of experimentation …
Wangechi Mutu: The End of eating Everything
September 15 – November 25, 2018
Wangechi Mutu’s animated video The End of eating Everything features the singer Santigold as a post-apocalyptic being hovering in a darkened sky. Her bulbous, tumor-like body, covered in human limbs and machine parts, throbs and emits plumes of smoke as she greedily devours a flock of birds. Mutu’s monstrous creation suggests the destructive—and …
Framing Eugène Atget: Photography and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris
September 8 – December 2, 2018
Eugène Atget trained his lens on the city and people of Paris for nearly four decades. The resulting photographic archive presents an enigmatic portrait of an evolving metropolis at the dawn of the twentieth century. This exhibition pairs over thirty photographs, printed from Atget’s glass plate negatives, with etchings, engravings, and lithographs by …
Vincent Valdez: The City
July 17 – October 28, 2018
For the in-depth exhibition page, visit blantonmuseum.org/chapter/about-the-art/
From the Page to the Street: Latin American Conceptualism
June 30 – August 26, 2018
In the 1960s–70s, artists in Latin America participated in the profound reorientation of art traditions known loosely at the time as Conceptualism. From the Page to the Street illustrates the diverse forms these new practices took – including photographs and video, mail art, poems, Xerox copies, publications, and proposals – and the critical …
Ancestral Modern: Australian Aboriginal Art from the Kaplan & Levi Collection
June 3 – September 9, 2018
Ancestral Modern: Australian Aboriginal Art from the Kaplan & Levi Collection features contemporary painting and sculpture by Australian Aboriginal artists. Curated by Pamela McClusky, Curator of African and Oceanic Art at the Seattle Art Museum, the exhibition celebrates the renaissance that has occurred since the 1970s within the millennia-old traditions of indigenous Australian art. …
Lenka Clayton: The Distance I Can Be From My Son
June 2 – September 2, 2018
In 2013, Lenka Clayton attempted to objectively measure the furthest distance she could be from her toddler son in three environments: a city park, the alley behind their Pittsburgh home, and in the aisles of a local supermarket. The trio of videos humorously underlines the challenging judgment calls that parents make about how …
Illusion and Imagination: Pictorial Decorations for Architectural Spaces, 1500-1800
March 24 – June 17, 2018
Depicting foreshortened figures and employing dramatic perspective, Renaissance and Baroque painters created convincing illusions on church ceilings and palace walls. This exhibition showcases drawings artists used to develop and record ideas for paintings that filled grand architectural spaces. Often the boundary between the real and the imagined is blurred in these works, allowing …
James Drake: Tongue-Cut Sparrows
March 10 – May 20, 2018
Born in El Paso, James Drake grew up in Guatemala and now lives in Santa Fe. His work often explores borders and boundaries: of gender, of language, and of those between countries and cultures, especially between the United States and Mexico. In “Tongue-Cut Sparrows,” Drake worked with the female partners of men imprisoned …
Form into Spirit: Ellsworth Kelly’s ‘Austin’
February 18 – April 29, 2018
Austin, the monumental last work by renowned American artist Ellsworth Kelly (1923—2015), is a freestanding stone building with luminous colored glass windows that is now part of the Blanton’s permanent collection. The structure has its roots in the artist’s deep appreciation of historical European art and architecture, and this exhibition explores how Austin’s conceptual origins began …
Clarissa Tossin: Meeting of Waters
January 13 – July 1, 2018
The title of Clarissa Tossin’s (Brazil, 1973) new body of work is taken from the confluence of the Rio Negro and Amazon Rivers, where the two bodies of water, each very different in color, converge but remain separate. Her exhibition in the Blanton’s Contemporary Project space will feature the artist’s sculptures, including a …
2017
Lais Myrrha: Infinite Column
December 9, 2017 – February 25, 2018
Lais Myrrha (Belo Horizonte, 1974) addresses the failures of Brazil’s mid-century modernist project through a critique of architecture and its primary materials. Her video Infinite Column (2011) features cement bags being continuously stacked in a single, increasingly unstable column. Titled after an iconic monument by Constantin Brancusi, Myrrha’s video questions the role of monuments and …
Line Form Color
December 9, 2017 – March 11, 2018
In the twentieth century, as some artists began to reject traditional representation and explore abstraction, many adopted an elemental vocabulary of lines, shapes, and colors. Flourishing simultaneously in Europe, Latin America, and the United States, this graphic lexicon is visible in many of the century’s artistic movements, such as concrete art, hard-edge abstraction, …
The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip
November 25, 2017 – January 7, 2018
The American photographer Stephen Shore once declared, “Our country is made for long trips.” While the myth of the Western frontier had long engaged artists, and photographers including Walker Evans and Edward Weston immortalized their travels through the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, the American road trip gained new prominence in …
Dancing with Death
September 2 – November 26, 2017
By the year 1500, a new genre of visual and literary culture was thriving in Europe: the dance of death or danse macabre. Dancing with Death will feature works on paper spanning from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries that highlight this visual tradition of bringing death to life. By animating death and transforming …
Shahzia Sikander: SpiNN (III)
September 2 – November 26, 2017
This animation by Shahzia Sikander (Lahore, Pakistan, 1969) is set in an imperial Mughal court, with stylized hairdos rising from the disappearing bodies of Gopi women, or female worshippers of the Hindu god Krishna. Black hair rises from the women’s heads in a swarm of dark, swirling forms, like a flock of birds …
Austin Collects Contemporary: Selections from the Blanton’s Recent Gift from The Contemporary
August 5 – December 30, 2017
This exhibition celebrates The Contemporary Austin’s recent gift to the Blanton Museum and underscores our commitment to building a world-class collection of contemporary art in Austin. It features contemporary sculpture, drawing, and photography, including Polly Apfelbaum’s Townsville (2000), a sculpture composed of colorful hand-dyed pieces of velvet arranged in a spiral on the floor, and six prints made by …
Epic Tales from Ancient India: Paintings from the San Diego Museum of Art
July 9 – October 1, 2017
July 9 – October 15, 2017 Comprising 91 Indian paintings from the renowned Edwin Binney 3rd Collection at the San Diego Museum of Art, this exhibition and the accompanying catalogue will introduce audiences to beloved characters such as Rama, Sita, Hanuman, Krishna, and the great Persian hero Rostam—as well as an assortment of …
Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler: Giant
July 9 – October 1, 2017
Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler’s expansive practice interweaves hybrid forms of storytelling and invites suggestive, open-ended reflections on place, history, and memory. In their three-channel film installation Giant (2014), Hubbard / Birchler present a decaying movie set just outside Marfa, Texas, left behind after the 1956 filming of Giant, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock …
Surabhi Saraf: FOLD
June 3 – August 27, 2017
In the projected video, FOLD (2010), a grid of twelve-by-eight frames captures the Indian-born, San Francisco-based artist Surabhi Saraf in jeans and a white shirt as she folds laundry on the couch. Through color, sound, repetition, fragmentation, and multiplication, Saraf turns a prosaic activity into a captivating visual and sonic experience. With a …
Piranesi’s Rome
May 27 – August 20, 2017
The Blanton Museum of Art presents Piranesi’s Rome, an exhibition of more than forty prints by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), along with large-scale maps of Rome, books, and plaster casts of Greek and Roman architectural fragments. From technical cross-sections of bridges to fantastical images of ruins, Piranesi’s prints will take you on a journey …
Nina Katchadourian: Curiouser
March 12 – June 11, 2017
This mid-career survey will explore approximately ten major bodies of work by celebrated Brooklyn-based artist Nina Katchadourian (b. 1968), including video, photography, sculpture, sound art, and a live performance. Nina Katchadourian: Curiouser is organized by Blanton curator of modern and contemporary art, Veronica Roberts, and will be the first touring museum exhibition of …
Red Chalk and John Martin: Paradise Lost
February 12 – May 14, 2017
The Paper Vault showcases the Blanton’s collection of more than 16,000 prints, drawings, and photographs. Curators will rotate selections throughout the year, engaging visitors with prints and drawings that are rarely on view. The first rotations include twenty-four mezzotints illustrating John Milton’s epic poem in John Martin: Paradise Lost, and Red Chalk Drawings, a …
Susan Philipsz: Part File Score
February 12 – July 9, 2017
The Contemporary Project is a gallery on the museum’s 2nd floor devoted to recently-made art. Installations will rotate throughout the year. Inaugurating the Blanton’s Contemporary Project gallery is Turner Prize-winning artist Susan Philipsz’s Part File Score. First exhibited at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin in 2014, the work is an immersive experience of sound …
Javier Téllez: Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See
February 12 – May 14, 2017
Javier Téllez’ film and installation work challenges the role of authoritative institutions and established notions of normalcy. For this black and white film transferred to video, Téllez stages an enactment of an Asian parable that recounts how six blind individuals were asked to touch an elephant and relay their experience. The title for …
2016
Warhol: By the Book
October 16, 2016 – January 29, 2017
October 16, 2016 – January 29, 2017 The first exhibition in the United States to examine this significant body of work, Warhol By the Book is a comprehensive examination of Andy Warhol’s extensive work in books—an overlooked but important facet of the artist’s creativity and career. Featuring jacket covers, illustrations, drawings, screen prints, …
Goya: Mad Reason
June 19 – September 25, 2016
June 19, 2016 – September 25, 2016 The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin presents Goya: Mad Reason, an exhibition of nearly 150 prints and paintings by renowned Spanish court painter Francisco de Goya. The series of prints comprising Goya: Mad Reason—borrowed from Yale University Art Gallery’s distinguished …
Xu Bing: Book from the Sky
June 19, 2016 – January 22, 2017
June 19, 2016 – January 22, 2017 The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin presents Xu Bing: Book from the Sky, a monumental installation by celebrated Chinese artist Xu Bing. Regarded as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century Chinese art, Book from the Sky ushered in the avant-garde …
Fixing shadows: Contemporary Peruvian Photography, 1968-2015
April 23 – July 3, 2016
April 23, 2016 – July 3, 2016 The Blanton Museum of Art presents Fixing Shadows: Contemporary Peruvian Photography, 1968–2015, featuring more than 40 works from a transformational period of artistic growth, political turmoil, and social engagement in Peru. Realized in collaboration with the university’s Harry Ransom Center, this exhibition will present photographs from …
Come as You Are: Art of the 1990s
February 21 – May 15, 2016
February 21, 2016 – May 15, 2016 The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin presents Come as You Are: Art of the 1990s, the first major museum survey to examine, within an historical context, art that emerged in this pivotal decade. The exhibition showcases approximately 45 artists born …
2015
The Crusader Bible: A Gothic Masterpiece
December 12, 2015 – April 3, 2016
December 12, 2015 – April 3, 2016 The Blanton Museum presents The Crusader Bible: A Gothic Masterpiece, an exhibition of over forty unbound pages from the one of the most celebrated French illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages.
Moderno: Design for Living in Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela, 1940–1978
October 11, 2015 – January 17, 2016
October 11, 2015 – January 17, 2016 The Blanton presented Moderno: Design for Living in Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela, 1940–1978. Organized by the Americas Society in New York, the exhibition is the first to examine how design transformed the domestic landscape of Latin America, during a period marked by major stylistic developments and …
Donald Moffett
August 29, 2015 – February 28, 2016
August 29, 2015 – February 28, 2016 As part of a growing initiative to increase holdings by artists from Texas or currently based in the state, the Blanton Museum of Art presented a special installation of newly acquired works by San Antonio native Donald Moffett. In this intimate presentation, Moffett’s diverse and influential …
Natalie Frank: The Brothers Grimm
July 11 – November 15, 2015
July 11, 2015 – November 15, 2015 The Blanton Museum of Art presents Natalie Frank: The Brothers Grimm, an exhibition of more than 30 gouache and pastel drawings by artist Natalie Frank, a New York-based Austin native. Organized by The Drawing Center in New York, this presentation explores the nineteenth-century fairy tales of …
Impressionism and the Caribbean: Francisco Oller and His Transatlantic World
June 14 – September 6, 2015
June 14, 2015 – September 6, 2015 The Blanton Museum presents Impressionism and the Caribbean: Francisco Oller and His Transatlantic World, an exhibition of approximately eighty paintings by Realist-Impressionist painter Francisco Oller (1833–1917) and his contemporaries. Organized by the Brooklyn Museum and debuting at the Blanton, the exhibition reveals Oller’s important contributions to …
Wildly Strange: The Photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard
March 7 – June 21, 2015
March 7, 2015 – June 21, 2015 The Blanton Museum of Art and the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin present Wildly Strange: The Photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard. The exhibition features over 35 photographs—including never-before exhibited prints—exclusively drawn from the Ransom Center’s photography collection and archives of writers …
Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties
February 15 – May 10, 2015
February 15, 2015 – May 10, 2015 The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin presents Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties, an exhibition of approximately 100 works by 66 artists that explores how painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, and photography not only responded to the political and …
2014
James Drake: Anatomy of Drawing and Space (Brain Trash)
October 19, 2014 – January 4, 2015
October 19 – January 4, 2015 The Blanton Museum of Art presented an immersive exhibition of works by virtuosic draftsman James Drake. Anatomy of Drawing and Space (Brain Trash) represented the culmination of two consecutive years of active creation by the Texas native, now Santa Fe-based artist. Committing to draw every day for …
La línea continua
September 20, 2014 – February 15, 2015
September 20 – February 15, 2015 The Blanton Museum of Art presented La línea continua, a selection of approximately 70 works from the Judy and Charles Tate Collection of Latin American art. Recently gifted to the museum, the collection—the entirety of which will ultimately come to the Blanton—includes painting, drawing, prints, sculpture, and …
In the Company of Cats and Dogs
June 22 – September 21, 2014
June 22, 2014 – September 21, 2014 Throughout history, artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Francisco Goya, and William Wegman have created works that explore the relationship between people, cats, and dogs. Today amateur videographers post videos to the Internet that receive thousands of views daily. What is the reason for our enduring fascination …
Francesca Consagra on In the Company of Cats and Dogs
June 1 – June 30, 2014
June 2014 Takahashi Hiroaki (Shotei), Published by Fusui Gabo,Cat Prowling Around a Staked Tomato Plant, 1931Woodblock print, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Gift of Stephanie Hamilton in memory of Leslie A. Hamilton To introduce our new exhibition, In the Company of Cats and Dogs, curator Francesca Consagra shares a …
Images of Abundance: Food in Between Mountains and Sea
March 1 – March 31, 2014
March 2014 An embroidered mantle patterned in vivid indigos and reds. A meticulously modeled crustacean in clay. Black ceramic bottles burnished to give off a metallic sheen. Nasca Culture, Peru,Early Intermediate Period (100 BCE – 600 CE),Bowl with aji (chili peppers),Ceramic, slip paints,Department of Art and Art History, College …
Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt
February 23 – May 18, 2014
February 23, 2014 – May 18, 2014 Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt celebrated the close friendship between two of the most significant American artists of the post-war era: Eva Hesse (1936–1970) and Sol LeWitt (1928–2007). Organized by Veronica Roberts, the Blanton’s curator of modern and contemporary art, the exhibition featured approximately …
Perception Unfolds: Looking at Deborah Hay’s Dance
February 23 – May 18, 2014
February 23, 2014 – May 18, 2014 Perception Unfolds: Looking at Deborah Hay’s Dance presented an innovative union of art, dance and technology within a museum setting. With its debut at the Blanton, the site-specific video installation combined the groundbreaking choreography of dance pioneer Deborah Hay with new software technologies created to study …
Between Mountains and Sea: An Interview with Curator Kimberly Jones
February 1 – March 1, 2014
February 2014 This weekend, we opened the much-anticipated exhibition Between Mountains and Sea: Arts of the Ancient Andes. A collaboration with UT’s Department of Art and Art History, the exhibition comprises a special selection of objects that illuminate the lifestyle, technological achievements, and ideology of pre-Inka cultures among the coastal Andes of South America. With …
Between Mountains and Sea: Arts of the Ancient Andes
February 1 – August 17, 2014
February 1, 2014 – August 17, 2014 The Blanton Museum of Art, in partnership with the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, presented a special selection of objects that illuminated the lifestyle, technological achievements, and ideology of pre-Inka cultures among the coastal Andes of South America.