The Morgan Library’s exhibition on tarot is ostensibly about a deck of cards. It is also about something far less tangible: intuition, symbolism, archetypes, and our enduring desire to make meaning from uncertainty.

Among the highlights are Chris Ofili’s extraordinary new tarot drawings. Rooted in Trinidadian Carnival, mythology, literature, and personal iconography, they expand the familiar cards into richly layered worlds. They feel ancient and entirely contemporary at once, reminding us that symbols never stand still—they evolve as we do.

Seeing them brought me back to the exhibition I organized with Chris at the Aspen Art Museum. During the installation, Frank Stella came by. He stood beneath a ladder, one arm draped over each side, looking quietly for what felt like hours. He wasn’t talking or analyzing. He was simply looking. It remains one of the clearest examples I have ever witnessed of the generosity one artist can extend to another.

I’ve always thought of tarot less as a way of predicting the future than as a way of paying closer attention to the present. The cards don’t provide answers so much as they offer another framework for asking questions. Artists do much the same thing.

Intuition deserves a place alongside knowledge. Not in opposition to it, but in conversation with it. Some of the most meaningful decisions in my life and career have come from trusting something I couldn’t fully explain at the time.

Art asks us to practice that same kind of trust. Sometimes a work opens itself immediately. More often, it unfolds slowly, revealing something new each time we encounter it. Like the best tarot reading, its meaning is never fixed.