Student Surrealist Art Exhibit
“Future-Casting and Fortune-Finding”
Initiated in 1985, the annual Dalí Museum Student Surrealist Art Exhibit presents work by Florida middle and high school students that explores ideas and visions inspired by the work of Salvador Dalí and the Surrealists. Students are asked to experiment with surrealist techniques such as visual transformation, dislocation and symbolism to create their works. This year’s theme “Future-Casting and Fortune-Finding” invites students to imagine a future before it exists and work to make it a reality, just as Dalí did throughout his career.
This exhibit is comprised of three distinct student shows featured at The Dalí Museum in 2027:
Pinellas County: Jan 9–Feb 28
Hillsborough County: Mar 13–Apr 25
Statewide: May 8–Aug 1
As a young artist, Dalí knew he was destined for a future only he could achieve. He trusted his own perception over convention and believed it would serve him well. At age 17, he ignored the instructions for his entrance exam at Madrid’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, completing his own version of the assignment instead and was admitted anyway. Throughout his life, he treated identity as something to pursue and construct, always daring to be himself. He understood that fate and free will are never fully separate, even casting himself as The Magician in the Dalí Tarot deck to suggest his own power of manifestation.
Dalí also illustrated the future directly. In his Imaginations and Objects of the Future series (1975), he envisioned self-sustaining cities, telepathic communication and technology that resembles today’s augmented reality; he imagined and built what didn’t yet exist. Still, Dalí’s fascination with the future was not limited to imagining what was still to come. It also shaped the way he revisited and transformed ideas from his own past. His own iconic imagery evolved with time: his iconic painting, The Persistence of Memory (1931), was reimagined decades later in The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (c. 1952–54), reflecting how his outlook shifted as the world changed.
With this theme, students are challenged to build a future self or a future world the way Dalí built his own: equal parts of fate, defiance, invention and free will.
The Student Surrealist Art Exhibitions and receptions are funded by a generous gift from anonymous donors and in part from a program endowment fund established by the Craig and Jan Sher Philanthropic Fund, with further support from Museum Docent Steven Lawson and Nancy Hewitt. Additional support for this educational program is provided by Museum partners, the City of St. Petersburg and the Florida Dept of State, Division of Arts and Culture.
This exhibit is held in the Raymond James Community Room on the ground floor of the Museum. Access to the Museum’s ground floor is free and open to the public. The Raymond James Community Room occasionally closes for private events, in which case, the exhibit will not be accessible.