Main Projects presents Major Arcana, a group exhibition featuring 22 artists, each invited to interpret one of the 22 cards that comprise tarot's Major Arcana. Representing the fundamental experiences and forces that shape human life, from love and ambition to uncertainty, mortality, and transformation, these archetypes have served as subjects of artistic interpretation for centuries. The exhibition considers how their familiar imagery continues to evolve, acquiring new meanings through the perspectives of contemporary artists.
Tarot originated in fifteenth-century Italy as an illustrated card game, with some of the earliest surviving decks commissioned as elaborate hand-painted objects. Its association with divination emerged centuries later, but artists have remained central to the development of its visual language. From Renaissance allegories to Pamela Colman Smith's influential illustrations for the 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith deck, tarot's imagery has continually been reimagined, reflecting the beliefs, anxieties, and aspirations of different eras.
In Major Arcana, the participating artists approach their assigned cards through the subjects, materials, and conceptual concerns of their individual practices. While some draw upon traditional iconography, others offer unexpected interpretations, revealing the elasticity of a symbolic system that has remained recognizable across centuries.
Emily Mae Smith reimagines The Hierophant, traditionally associated with spiritual authority and established belief systems, through her recurring broom character. Replacing the conventional priestly figure with an enlightened broom, Smith draws upon symbols of knowledge from both the natural and human worlds. Ernesto Renda's The Chariot (Cody Rigsby) offers a contemporary interpretation of ambition and determination through the figure of a Peloton instructor, suggesting the paradox of constant motion without forward progress. In The Last Bid (Phyllis Kao), Luke O'Halloran interprets Death through the figure of the art auctioneer, poised with gavel in hand at the moment before an uncertain outcome becomes final. Sophia Narrett's embroidered Certain Arrow approaches The Sun through its associations with vitality and fulfillment. Depicting an arrow that has reached its target before being released, Narrett collapses anticipation and achievement into a single image, suggesting the possibility that what we strive for may already be within reach.
These works reflect the breadth of interpretive possibilities contained within the Major Arcana, whose symbols resist definitive readings. Across painting, drawing, embroidery, and sculpture, the exhibition brings together distinct artistic approaches to a common visual framework, revealing how ideas of power, fate, identity, and transformation shift across individual experiences and cultural contexts.