AUSTIN, TX.- Home to Ellsworth Kelly’s ‘temple of light’ Austin, an impressive collection of over 21,000 works, and grounds designed by the award-winning architecture firm Snøhetta, under the 10+ years leadership of Simone Wicha the Blanton has established itself as one of the leading US museums, while also becoming an essential community place for Austin’s rapidly growing population. In 2025, the Museum will welcome shows including artists famed modernists Arshile Gorky and Isamu Noguchi; celebrated Old Masters like El Greco and Velázquez; and the most cutting-edge voices of today like Chinese multimedia artist Cao Fei.

Major upcoming exhibitions include:

In Creative Harmony: Three Artistic Partnerships (February 16–July 20, 2025) shines a light on the Blanton’s curatorial excellency, bringing together three of their curators—former Associate Curator of Collections and Exhibitions Claire Howard, Curator of Latin American Art Vanessa Davidson, and Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Hannah Klemm—to organize an exhibition on three unique artistic partnerships between friends Gorky and Noguchi; printmaker José Guadalupe Posada and his collector (also printmaker) Artemio Rodriguez; as well as Pueblo mother-daughter duo Nora and Eliza Naranjo Morse. This show takes over three galleries to display the diversity of collaboration not only between artists but curators alike.

Cao Fei: Whose Utopia (March 22–August 31, 2025) presents the Chinese multimedia artist’s video work Whose Utopia (2006). The video highlights the workforce at the OSRAM lighting factory located in China’s Pearl River Delta region. As the video unfolds, documentation of the production line evolves into surreal performances by the workers. Each person transforms into a character of their own design—from a ballerina to a tai chi master. They dance or play music, while the production of light bulbs continues to happen all around them. The aim, according to Fei, was to “release the workers from a standardized notion of productivity.”

Spirit & Splendor: El Greco, Velázquez, and the Hispanic Baroque (August 24, 2025–February 1, 2026) sees The Blanton Museum collaborate with the Hispanic Society Museum & Library to present a selection of their collection, the most extensive of early modern Hispanic art and literature outside of Spain. Showcasing 57 works, the exhibition includes masterpieces by renowned artists like El Greco and Diego Velázquez, as well as by José de Páez and Melchor Pérez Holguín, painters who actively spread the Baroque aesthetic in Mexico and Peru, territories that at the time were under Spanish rule.

These exhibitions follow the completion of the Blanton Museum’s new grounds, which–alongside the museum’s thoughtful exhibition program–have led to the Museum’s highest attendance to date in 2024 (255,000 visitors, some of the highest of any university museum in the U.