A painting just over three and a half feet tall now hangs on the third floor of The Baker Museum. René Magritte painted The Reckless Sleeper in 1928, and Tate bought it in 1969. Since then it has lived in a London collection. Through February 14, 2027, it hangs at 5833 Pelican Bay Boulevard.
It came with a crowd. The Surrealist International: Fifty Years of Dreams opened October 17 with paintings, photographs, sculptures and objects drawn from Tate's collection. The lineup includes Eileen Agar, Jean Arp, Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Dora Maar, Joan Miró, Lee Miller, Man Ray and Dorothea Tanning. Very few American museums get to show this exhibition, and one of them sits at the southern edge of Pelican Bay. That gives it a deadline worth planning around.
Three American Cities, and Naples Is the Middle One
Gulfshore Life reports that the show was curated at Tate in London, debuted in Paris and reaches only three American cities. The schedules posted by the other two museums show where Naples falls in that run.
| Stop | Venue | Dates |
|---|---|---|
| First | Frist Art Museum, Nashville | May 22 to Aug. 30, 2026 |
| Second | The Baker Museum, Naples | Oct. 17, 2026 to Feb. 14, 2027 |
| Third | Seattle Art Museum | Apr. 1 to Aug. 1, 2027 |
Nashville's showing closed at the end of August. Seattle's won't open until April. The Naples run fills the winter in between, covering Thanksgiving, the December holidays and the start of the new year. Nashville presented the show under a different title, International Surrealism from Tate: Fifty Years of Dreams. Seattle Art Museum describes the tour as marking the centenary of the first Surrealist exhibition, held in Paris in November 1925. That show followed André Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924.
Gulfshore Life also reports that the Naples installation combines about 100 traveling artworks with around 30 archival pieces from The Baker Museum. Most of what's on the third floor traveled from London, and the rest belongs to the museum hosting it.
What Hangs on the Third Floor
Surrealism was never a single defined style, so the exhibition is organized by idea rather than by date or nationality. Artis groups the works around five themes.
- The inspiration of dreams
- The mysterious energies of the natural world
- The politics of freedom
- The power of unexpected objects
- The liberation of repressed desires
The works Artis highlights show how widely these themes reach. Magritte's The Future of Statues from 1937 is oil paint on a plaster form about 13 inches tall. Duchamp's Why Not Sneeze Rose Sélavy? was first made in 1921, and the version on view is a 1964 replica. It is a small object built from wood, metal, marble, cuttlefish bone, a thermometer and glass, and it measures less than nine inches across. It belongs in the unexpected-objects section, and it rewards a slow look.
Painting holds the larger walls. Miró's Women and Bird in the Moonlight dates from 1949, and Tate bought it in 1951. Adolph Gottlieb's The Alchemist from 1945 and Paul Nash's Landscape from a Dream, painted between 1936 and 1938, show the movement spreading to American and British artists.
The title's "international" also covers artists who are less familiar to most visitors. These include Ithell Colquhoun, Kati Horna, Malangatana Ngwenya, Osamu Shiihara and Lionel Wendt. Artis describes their work as deserving to be better known. On a first visit, the Magritte and the Dalí tend to draw people in. On a second visit, these galleries are a good place to start.
A Second Show Downstairs, With a Naples Artist in It
A Surrealist ticket also covers the other show that opened the same day. Florida Contemporary 2026–27 is the 14th edition of the museum's annual exhibition of four artists working in Florida. It fills the Hayes Hall galleries and The Blair Foundation Gallery and runs much longer, through June 27, 2027.
One of this year's four artists lives in Naples. Nicario Jiménez-Quispe was born in Ayacucho, Perú, in 1957. He is a master retablo artist whose detailed mixed-media dioramas combine Andean tradition with present-day themes of resilience, migration and daily life. The Smithsonian Institution has shown his work and holds it in its permanent collection.
Jacksonville painter and muralist Dustin Harewood, who grew up in New York City and Barbados, is creating a site-specific mural in The Blair Foundation Gallery. Because it is painted for the room, it can only be seen in this room. The other two artists are Savannah Magnolia of Tampa and Anastasia Samoylova of Miami.
The two shows make an unusual pair. Upstairs is a century-old European movement as it spread around the world, drawn from one of the world's major collections. Downstairs, a Naples artist carries an Andean folk tradition into the present day. Both start from the same idea, that ordinary life can be rearranged into something stranger and more revealing.
There is one practical catch. Artis notes that access to Florida Contemporary is limited during ticketed Hayes Hall performances. It recommends calling patron services at 239-597-1900 before a visit to confirm the galleries are open.
The Season, Date by Date
The Surrealist show runs through February 14. A few fixed dates before then are worth marking now.
- November 8, 1 to 5 p.m. Fall Community Day brings free admission, with museum tours in English and Spanish. Artis lists the Surrealist exhibition among the shows on view. The afternoon also includes a Baker Museum scavenger hunt, an instrument petting zoo, face painting and bilingual storytelling.
- Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day and New Year's Day. The museum is closed all three days, so check the calendar before taking holiday guests.
- January 28, 2 p.m. All four Florida Contemporary artists, Harewood, Jiménez-Quispe, Magnolia and Samoylova, appear together on a panel. Same-day museum admission is included.
- February 14, 2027. The Surrealist exhibition closes. Its next stop is Seattle, in April.
Gulfshore Life reports that Stephanie D'Alessandro, modern art curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, is also scheduled to give a guest lecture during the Naples run. The date will appear on the Artis events calendar.
Hours, Admission and the Free Tours
Regular hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and noon to 4 p.m. on Sunday. The museum is closed Mondays. Some evenings have extended hours through the Music and Museum and Art After Hours programs.
Admission is set up to make repeat visits easy. The Baker Museum's admission page lists:
- Adults: $10
- Full-time students with ID: $5
- Active military with ID: $5
- Visitors with a SNAP EBT card and photo ID: $1, covering up to four adults per card
- Children 17 and under: free
- Friends of Artis: free
Children 17 and under get in free, so the Surrealist galleries cost nothing for visiting grandchildren over the holidays. Duchamp's small object built around a thermometer and cuttlefish bone, and Magritte's painted plaster sculpture, give younger visitors something to examine up close.
Docent-led exhibition tours are free. From October through May they run Tuesday through Saturday at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., with a Sunday tour at 1 p.m. Groups of 15 or fewer do not need to RSVP. Outdoor sculpture tours start up on Thursdays at 10 a.m. in November and continue through May. With two tours a day, a guest who arrives Friday afternoon can still catch a guided walk through the Surrealist galleries on Saturday morning.
For evening and weekend events, Artis directs visitors to parking on campus, in partner lots across Ridgewood Drive and on levels 3 through 5 of the Waterside Shops garage. A free Artis cart shuttle runs from the Waterside lots to the east entrance of Hayes Hall, and the campus has three EV charging spaces. That makes it easy to pair a gallery visit with an errand or a late lunch at Waterside.
Darlene has spent more than two decades helping clients settle into the Naples and Marco Island way of life, and a Tate exhibition on Pelican Bay Boulevard is part of the life people move here for. If you're hosting guests this season and want ideas for the rest of their visit, or you're wondering which Pelican Bay residences put you closest to evenings like these, The Roddy Luxury Group is glad to talk it through. Contact Us.
