University of New Mexico Art Museum Center for the Arts (Main Campus)

To Form from Air: Music and the Art of Raymond Jonson

September 10 to December 19, 2010

Upon arriving in Santa Fe from Chicago in 1924, Raymond Jonson (1891-1982) was one of the first artists to establish a healthy and active climate for modernism in the Southwest, which included the founding of the Transcendental Painting Group in 1938, the only other fully organized body of non-objective painters outside New York in the 1930s.   Long recognized by collectors and arts institutions worldwide, Jonson’s contributions to the development of American abstraction have deserved a broader awareness and critical examination.  The exhibition, To Form from Air, will for the first time probe the inspired relationship between music and a specific group of Raymond Jonson’s paintings from the 1920s, '30s, and '40s.

To Form from Air: Music and the Art of Raymond Jonson will mark the 75th anniversary of Jonson’s relationship with the University of New Mexico, where he taught from 1934-54, and the 60th anniversary of his founding of the Jonson Gallery on the UNM campus in 1950.

A fully illustrated catalog (Museums of New Mexico Press, 2010) with essays by Robert Ware and MaLin Wilson-Powell will accompany the exhibition.