About the Museum

The Blanton Museum of Art welcomes and engages all visitors by offering personal, extraordinary experiences that connect art and ideas. Serving the University of Texas campus and beyond, the museum stimulates the thriving, creative community that is Austin, Texas. Located where Congress Avenue meets The University of Texas, the new Blanton building is home to an inspiring collection of over 17,000 works of art. The collection is recognized for its European Old Master paintings, modern and contemporary American and Latin American art, and an encyclopedic collection of prints and drawings. The Blanton is the largest university art museum in the country and the third largest museum in Texas.

2007-2008 Minigrant Project

If These Walls Could Speak

If These Walls Could Speak combines art and literature to provide new points of access to the Blanton by investigating the museum’s permanent collection through poetry. In collaboration with the Creative Writing Program in the College of Liberal Arts, the Blanton invited poets from throughout Texas to submit original ekphrastic poems related to a work in the museum’s permanent collection. Selected contributors were then invited to read their submissions in the museum’s permanent collection galleries to a public audience. These poems, images of the corresponding works, audio and video recordings of the poets’ readings, and commentary are included in the interactive presentation.

2008-2009 Minigrant Project

Collection of Greek Vases

The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin has developed a new interactive project that expands learning opportunities related to the Blanton’s collection of vases, both the ancient Greek black-figure and red-figure as well as the Southern Italian vases. This website serves as a specialized educational resource for university and K-12 educators, students, and public audiences to conduct a more in-depth exploration of the Blanton’s ancient vase collection, which until now has not received the recognition it deserves. These resources include exercises, activities, interpretive text, high-resolution images, and video recordings of various specialists (art historians, ceramicists, and educators) discussing the collection from their discipline’s point of view.

The New York Graphic Workshop: 1964 – 1970

Accompanying The New York Graphic Workshop: 1964 – 1970 was an online educational resource that provided insight into the lives of the three participating artists. The exhibition, on display from September 2008 to January 2009 at the Blanton Museum of Art, investigated the New York Graphic Workshop and its members, Luis Camnitzer, José Guillermo Castillo, and Liliana Porter, during the tenure of the Workshop (1964 to 1970). This exhibition was the first comprehensive presentation of a crucial, yet little-known episode in the history of American and Latin American Conceptual art. The mission of the three Latin American artists was to redefine the practice of printmaking in conceptual terms, focusing on the mechanical and repetitive nature of printmaking, rather than its traditional techniques.

The Blanton is recognized as a leader in the scholarship and presentation of Latin American art. Building on the museum’s 2007 exhibition, The Geometry of Hope, this exhibition further explores the contributions of Latin American artists to the modern and contemporary art narrative.

Francisco Matto

The Blanton Museum at The University of Texas at Austin developed a new interactive website to accompany the Blanton-organized exhibition, Francisco Matto: The Modern and the Mythic, on display at the Blanton from June through September 2009. The exhibition is the first comprehensive presentation in the United States of the work of Francisco Matto (Uruguayan, 1911-1995), a pioneer of modernist abstraction in Latin America. It presents over five decades of artistic production and continues the Blanton’s significant study of key South American figures of modernism from the 1920s to the 1970s.

The website functions as a specialized educational resource for visitors to expand learning opportunities and conduct a more in-depth exploration of the exhibition. Additionally, it allows broader access to the art and ideas of the exhibition for international audiences, universities, and K-12 teachers nationwide. The website greatly expands access to and exposure of this artist’s remarkably consistent and sophisticated productions that have, until now, remained almost entirely in Matto’s estate and a few private collections.

Goals and Outcomes

If These Walls Could Speak provides a new opportunity for both university and K-12 educators to teach about the creative process, poetry, and art and to replicate this activity as a writing exercise in their own classes. It also will be used as an interdisciplinary resource before, during, and after a museum visit, serving as a model project for other arts institutions across the country.

As the Blanton ekphrastic poetry project was a statewide effort, it attracts to the museum new audiences, both urban and rural, from throughout Texas as well as students of literature, English, creative writing, poetry, and other related disciplines. The Blanton feels that participating in the Edward and Betty Marcus Digital Education Project has helped expand their outreach into new audiences as well as form relationships across the University of Texas campus.

In addition, the education department will share the ekphrastic poetry project interactive at an interdisciplinary workshop for K-12 teachers connecting art and language arts called Visualizing Words during the 2008-09 academic year, thus extending the impact on Texas educators. The purpose of this professional development session is to give art and language arts teachers alike substantive and practical ways they can incorporate another discipline into their teaching, thereby offering students various entry points to learning about art and the Blanton’s collection.

The Blanton plans to create more interactive presentations to add to the e-Lounge on their website. They will evaluate the project based on the number of visitors to the site and feedback from the teachers participating in their workshop.

Where in Texas is the Blanton Museum of Art?

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