Symposium: Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions
A half-day symposium at the Morgan Library examines tarot imagery from its Renaissance origins through its influence on contemporary artistic practice.
Why we picked this
A rare opportunity to spend a half-day inside one of the Morgan's major exhibitions with the scholars who built it — the kind of deep-dive public programming that most museums don't offer.
The Morgan Library’s exhibition Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions brings together some of the earliest surviving tarot decks alongside contemporary works that draw on the same visual vocabulary. This companion symposium gathers multiple scholars to examine that lineage in depth — from the Visconti-Sforza cards of fifteenth-century Milan to the artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries who found in tarot imagery a persistent symbolic language.
The afternoon format allows for sustained engagement: not a single talk but a sequence of perspectives, each contributing to a fuller picture of how a set of images traveled five centuries and became newly relevant to contemporary artists working across traditions. Presenters bring backgrounds in Renaissance studies, art history, and curatorial practice.
Free with museum admission. An ideal afternoon for anyone who’s spent time with the exhibition and wants to understand it more fully, or who approaches art history as an ongoing conversation rather than a settled archive.