Mother and Daughter Nora and Eliza Naranjo Morse in Creative Harmony

Nora Naranjo Morse (b. 1953) and her daughter Eliza (b. 1980) have been collaborating as artists since the younger could walk, talk, and hold a pencil.

“Eliza was four and I was traveling through Denmark and Germany, and I remember playing ‘Pass It’ with her,” Nora Naranjo Morse recalls. “It was basically a piece of paper and pencil. I’d draw a line and pass it over to Eliza, and so we’d go back and forth. We're still doing it.”

The pair’s ‘Pass It’ creations are no longer limited to scrapbooks and refrigerator display, they are on view in museums now, specifically the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin where the mother-daughter duo is featured in the exhibition “In Creative Harmony: Three Artistic Partnerships,” through July 20, 2025. The presentation highlights three unique artistic partnerships: modern art giants and friends Arshile Gorky and Isamu Noguchi; iconic printmaker José Guadalupe Posada and his collector (also printmaker) Artemio Rodriguez; as well as Nora and Eliza Naranjo Morse.

“We build together, we farm together, we work with community together, and then we also have a creative practice that we share and join in on each other's projects and talk about nonstop,” Eliza Naranjo Morse said. “We’re consistently working together.”

Mom and daughter have always been close and are neighbors in Española, NM.

Installation view of artworks by Nora Naranjo Morse and Eliza Naranjo Morse in ‘In Creative Harmony: Three Artistic Partnerships,’ Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, February 16–July 20, 2025.

For “In Creative Harmony,” four works from their ‘Pass It’ print series – some original drawings on paper passed back and forth, printed and enlarged, others combinations of previous work – are joined by paintings and sculptures done individually, and a site-specific collaboration.

“Eliza and Nora did this beautiful (‘Pass It’) series where they collaborated, but they also collaborated on the (exhibition) design,” Blanton Museum of Art Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Hannah Klemm said. “They collaborated on the way the works interplay together in the (gallery) room, and they collaborate in that they both feed each other so much beautiful life and experience into their own works. Part of the idea of collaboration was that it's inextricable from creating.”

An emphasis of the exhibition is defeating the long-held myth of the lone genius artist.

“Collaborative modes of being in the world show up in individuals works; ideas of artistic creation and genius don't come out of a singular vacuum, they come through community, they come through collaboration, they come through working together,” Klemm continued.

“In all of this time spent together, doing all of these things, we’re consistently talking about what we're observing, what we're finding out, what we're learning,” Eliza Naranjo Morse said. “These common themes we're thinking about, like community, like being aware of the existence of life beyond human life. Both of us being interested in expressing those stories in different ways, this is the common theme of both of our works.”

And the guiding principles behind how they put together their portion of “In Creative Harmony.”

Installation view of artworks by Nora Naranjo Morse and Eliza Naranjo Morse in ‘In Creative Harmony: Three Artistic Partnerships,’ Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, February 16–July 20, 2025.

A Familiar (and Famous) Family Name

Nora and Eliza Naranjo Morse descend from one of the great Pueblo – and broadly American – historical art legacies. Nora’s mother is the legendary Kha’p’o Owingeh (Santa Clara Pueblo) pottery matriarch Rose Naranjo (1915-2004).

One of Nora’s sisters is a legendary potter in her own right, Jody Folwell (b. 1942), featured two weeks ago at “Essential West.” Like Nora and Eliza, Jody and her daughter Susan Folwell (b. 1970), are a power mother-daughter art tandem.

As is one of Nora Naranjo Morse and Jody Folwell’s nieces, Roxanne Swentzell (b. 1962), and her daughter, Rose B. Simpson (1983), arguably the most in-demand contemporary artist working in the United States today.

All descend from Rose Naranjo. All Kha’p’o Owingeh. All artists. All potters, although not exclusively potters. All with prominent museum exhibitions of their work, exhibitions increasingly focusing on their collaborations and knowledge passed down from mother to daughter.

The Naranjo’s are the most prominent, prolific, and celebrated family tradition in American art history. The Pueblos are full of such traditions, the Nampeyo/Namingha’s being another of the most esteemed. Nothing else in American art approaches it with the possible exception of the quilters of Gee’s Bend, AL.

There is a reason for this.

The native language of Tewa people, of which Kha’p’o Owingeh belongs, has no word for “art.” What outsiders consider “art” – painting, drawing, pottery, weaving – is inseparable from life in Tewa culture. These lifeways of making are handed down one generation to the next like walking and talking. Inseparable.

Artistry is the clothes they wear. The pottery used for storage. The land they call home. Their spiritual practices.

Installation view of artworks by Nora Naranjo Morse and Eliza Naranjo Morse in ‘In Creative Harmony: Three Artistic Partnerships,’ Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, February 16–July 20, 2025.

Pottery Plus

Conspicuously absent from this exhibition of Kha’p’o Owingeh artwork is the artform synonymous with Santa Clara: pottery.

“The perception of, ‘Oh, if you're from Santa Clara Pueblo, there should be a vessel somewhere.’ Challenging that is really, to me, a great thing,” Nora Naranjo Morse said. “I like that because it changes the perception of people who think that we should be making pottery.”

No pots, but clay remains a constant. The pair painted a center gallery structural pillar with clay. Three clay sculptures are positioned beside it.

“(The sculptures) stood in front of this pillar that we had painted with clay, and it looked like they were coming out of that pillar and making their presence known,” Nora Naranjo Morse said. “From there, that presence of these clay beings echoed out to the burlap beings and then to the walls and to our ‘Pass It’ exchange. There was a beautiful symmetry of color and ideas and histories that I was proud of.”

Art, pottery, clay, land, earth. Clay is not simply a material, it is elemental. It is home for the Pueblos.

“We painted circles on that (pillar) all the way up the length of it in clay to express this expanse of space of thinking and the connection to this earth material that is certainly in my mom's work, and then a sentiment of both conceptual focus and a reminder to myself to always add clay to my work to ground it,” Eliza Naranjo Morse said. “That’s some acknowledgement of this sense of place, and appreciation for the beauty of place. Being from Santa Clara, we’re people that are thinking about land and relationship to land, consistently, in all kinds of ways, all aspects of our daily life. That does show up in the art.”

Clay even shows up in Nora Naranjo Morse’s burlap figures – “Healers from Another Place” – some 10 feet in length. She began collecting burlap chili bags prior to the pandemic, not sure what she would do with them.

“I'm always thinking about what we're consuming and what we're wasting as people, and so by collecting all these burlap bags, I needed to find a purpose for them,” Nora Naranjo Morse said. “I started working on the idea of the healing aspect of not just myself, because I did get COVID, but that sense of what you do in isolation. After a while, I needed help with these large figures.”

She didn’t want that help to only come from fellow natives.

“I started slowly, but surely, entering this small community of younger women. When I say communities, that really was a wonderful thing that happened in this project, I started thinking about community in a much larger sense,” Nora Naranjo Morse said. “I started inviting not just Indigenous women, but women from communities outside of the Pueblos in our area. It started growing and is still continuing, this relationship between these women and myself.”

Eliza Naranjo Morse’s contribution of individually created artworks include a painting innovation reminiscent of carved fetishes with bundles.

“I don't think of them as fetishes, that’s not in my mind for them,” she said. “Parallelly to fetishes, without making a comparison, this real reverence and respect for the animals and other life forms in our world, and a sincere enjoyment for drawing the figure of any animal, human or not.”

The idea came to her over time, surprisingly, during meetings. School meetings. Museum meetings. Organizational meetings. What seems mundane – sitting around tables for hours with computers working through agendas – Eliza Naranjo Morse recognized as meaningful, purposeful work.

“(I wanted) to use animals to tell this human story, of the efforts that I see towards people working together, towards possibility,” she said.

In creative harmony.