The exhibition Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions, held at The Morgan Library & Museum in New York from June 26 to October 4, 2026, explores this very subject.
The exhibition traces the history of Tarot from the lavish playing cards of the Renaissance to works by contemporary artists, showing how familiar symbols continue to evolve and acquire new meanings.
Particular attention is given to 20th- and 21st-century artists who engage with Tarot archetypes and create their own interpretations of the deck. Featured artists include Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dalí, Remedios Varo, Chris Ofili, Betye Saar, Alison Saar, Marcel Dzama, and others.
For contemporary artists, Tarot is less a fixed system of symbols than an open structure that can be reinterpreted through their own cultural and personal experiences.
Some artists create their own decks, drawing on the history and culture of the African diaspora. Others reinterpret the arcana through political events, social change, and questions of identity. Some turn to alchemy, mysticism, ecology, and personal mythology, while others use the language of Tarot to explore memory, inner states, and human experience.
At the same time, the images themselves remain recognizable: the Magician, the High Priestess, Death, the Sun, the Moon, and other arcana continue to exist in the collective imagination, yet each artist can imbue them with new meanings.
This is one of the key characteristics of Tarot as an artistic material. A symbol has no single fixed meaning — it changes along with culture, time, and the person who looks at it.
