Salvador Dalí’s Sublime Faith
Inside The Met's new Raphael show, a curator's lessons on community work, shows to see in New York and LA, and a riotous April Fools' edition.
Salvador Dalí’s paintings of Christ are among his most polarizing works. Does his rarefied version of religion alienate us from the divine, or push us closer to transcendence? This week, Ed Simon plumbs Dalí’s “nuclear mysticism,” a marriage of quantum physics and Catholic faith that yielded a Crucifixion so unsettling it was physically attacked not once, but twice.
In other reads for a most pious or delightfully secular weekend, Emily Drew Miller embraces matzah as a medium to examine political rifts in the Jewish faith; Natalie Haddad takes us inside The Met's new Raphael show; and curator Ryan N. Dennis shares her journey from community engagement to leadership.
Plus: Check out our exclusive interview with the anonymous woman in all those gallery press photos ... and the rest of our 2026 April Fools issue. It's an annual Hyperallergic tradition, and a reminder that the revolution requires laughter.
—Valentina Di Liscia, senior editor
Salvador Dalí’s Frustrating Vision of the Divine
Having abandoned the profane for only the sacred, Dalí’s “Nuclear Mysticism” renounced the richness of experience for the aridity of metaphysics. | Ed Simon
Mondays at Pratt Institute: Weekly Openings of Work by Graduating Artists
Free and open to the public, Pratt Shows celebrate the school’s graduating students. MFA and BFA work is on view this spring in Brooklyn, New York.
News
- Melvin Edwards, whose innovative abstractions evoked both the sculptural canon and the haunting afterlives of slavery, has died at age 88.
- Marica Vilcek, a champion of immigrant artists and scientists, has died at the age of 89.
- Colorado could be the first state to create Artist Corporations, a new business structure that hopes to help enshrine intellectual property rights and expand healthcare access for cultural workers.
- Over 8 million demonstrators took to the streets in 3,300 anti-Trump protests across the nation last weekend, according to organizers. See our photos from New York’s No Kings's Day marches.
- In a heist lasting less than three minutes, thieves nabbed $10 million worth of paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, and Henri Matisse from a small museum in northern Italy.
- Ten years after Arts of Africa became its own department at the Brooklyn Museum, the institution is building a permanent home for the collection of over 4,500 objects and artworks.
Tonika Lewis Johnson: Segregation and How to Disrupt It
Join us on April 15 for a conversation with social justice artist and recent MacArthur “Genius Grant” winner Tonika Lewis Johnson and Hyperallergic Senior Editor Valentina Di Liscia.
From Our Critics
Kamrooz Aram Breaks Down the Grid
Rather than deconstruct Western modernism or reinsert Islamic visual idioms, the artist loosens the grip of the grid. | Aruna D’Souza
Juan Uslé’s Childhood Shipwrecks
A new retrospective at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid traces Uslé’s work from a Spanish shipwreck to its rebirth in New York City. | Lauren Moya Ford
A Palestinian-American Photographer’s Intimate Gaze
Dean Majd captured images of his inner circle for a decade, deconstructing performances of masculinity in the process. | Aaron Boehmer
Turner and Constable Hit the Screen
The camera glides smoothly over landscapes of old England in a film that tries hard to dramatize the rivalry between the two masters. | Michael Glover
Guides: April Shows to See
New York City: Margaret Curtis’s deconstruction of American myth, quotidian objects by Marsden Hartley, and Wendy Red Star’s bead-inspired installation.
Los Angeles: David Alekhuogie’s defiant collage, Hannah Tishkoff’s visual poetry, an iconic Angeleno printmaking studio, and portraits of Palestinian journalists,.
Upstate New York: Lisa Karrer’s “warm technology,” Deirdre O’Connell’s loving portraits, and Caleb Weintraub’s fantastical realms.
More to Read
Inside the Met Museum’s Historic Raphael Exhibition
“Asking for Raphael loans is like asking for the firstborn heir of the royal family,” Carmen C. Bambach, curator of the first comprehensive show of the master in the US, told Hyperallergic.| Natalie Haddad
Taking a Seat at Robert Therrien’s Table
The Broad invites us into the late artist’s obsessively iterative practice, where oversized tables and chairs give way to more elusive, personal forms. | Matt Stromberg
Nine Lessons on My Path From Engagement to Leadership
My career has been defined by a steady effort to collapse silos: between curatorial and educational work, between institutions and communities, between what museums have been and what they might yet become. | Ryan N. Dennis
15 Art Books for Your Spring Reading List
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s first catalog in 25 years, Molly Crabapple chronicles the Jewish Bund, a photographer captures a Black Southern waterway, and more
An Artist Embraces the Metaphorical Cracks of Matzah
“ The fractures in these images reflect how disconnected a lot of Jewish people feel from each other right now,” Emily Drew Miller told Hyperallergic. | Isa Farfan
Community
Opportunities in April 2026
Residencies, fellowships, grants, and open calls from Banff Centre, the Vilcek Foundation, and more in our monthly list of opportunities for artists, writers, and art workers.
Art Movements: Frieze Partners With ... the Whitney?
Also, the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts director retires, the Speed Museum’s newest residents, and “peep” this art!
A View From the Easel
“Getting a mold to work still feels like magic to me!”
In Memoriam: Remembering Glen Baxter, Pat Steir, Melvin Edwards
This week, we honor an absurdist cartoonist, a trailblazing feminist artist, and a sculptor who probed the history of violence in the US.
Required Reading
This week: Calida Rawles paints Blackness and water, the artists who shaped Fire Island, translating literature during the Tehran blackout, why weather apps suck, and more from around the internet.
