Superheroes Take Over the Met Opera House in “Super Duper”

The Metropolitan Opera House has always been a monument to grandeur. Its soaring arches, glittering chandeliers, and plush red carpets were designed to enshrine the high drama of Verdi, Wagner, and Puccini. This fall, however, those same spaces will be transformed into something at once more grounded and more fantastical: an exhibition in which contemporary artists, cartoonists, and provocateurs present their visions of a superhero for the 21st century.

The exhibition, titled “Super Duper,” spreads across the lobbies and foyers of the temple of high culture. The red carpets still lead patrons up the Opera House’s grand staircase, but the figures awaiting them at the top are no longer Wagnerian gods or Verdi heroines. Instead, there are 25 works by nearly as many artists—from cartoonists like Roz Chast and Art Spiegelman to contemporary stars like Maurizio Cattelan and Rashid Johnson—offering superheroes for 2025 that are strange, satirical, and deeply human. Except for two works by Spiegelman, every piece was commissioned for the show, ensuring that the responses feel squarely of the present moment.

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“Super Duper” opened Sunday to coincide with the Metropolitan Opera’s premiere of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a new adaptation of Michael Chabon‘s 2000 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel about two Jewish comic book creators inventing a superhero during the Golden Age of comics in the 1930s.

Chabon’s novel was a thinly disguised rewriting of the history of Superman, who was created in 1938 by two Jewish teenagers in Cleveland, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who were responding to the shadow of fascism rising in Europe. The novel—and the newly premiered opera—examine how, from the start, superheroes were a mythic language for modern crises, an American invention born of displacement and dread. “Kavalier & Clay is about two cousins, Jewish, who react to the rise of fascism in Germany by inventing a comic book character called the Escapist. The time we’re in now has many affinities,” said Dodie Kazanjian, who founded the opera house’s art program, Gallery Met, in 2006. “It felt like it was ripe to ask artists to imagine what a super hero might look like today.” The show imagines then what superheroes we might need in our fractured age, consumed as it is by climate anxiety, authoritarian politics, and identity debates.

Together, the contributions to “Super Duper” move away from capes and spandex, opening the field to alternative identities. Heroes here can be animals, myths, abstractions, and even figures of fragility and transformation rather than invulnerability.

One of the most engaging pictures in the exhibition also has the most literal tie to Kavalier & Clay. Jamian Juliano-Villani recreates the book’s paperback covers of the Empire State building. In the center are two hands, with thumbs and pointers forming a frame though which appears a black and white version of the cover. In it, a man leaps from the top of the skyscraper, a rope attached from his waist to the building’s spire. The book’s more well known, colorful cover spreads outside of the frame.

The other works vary, some are pure abstraction, others are figurative to the point of skirting religious iconography. John Currin’s work shows two angels—flush-faced women in luxurious robes—supporting a grey, thin, sickly looking man while a third woman, simultaneously busty and demure, stands over the group, her arms open. Rachel Fienstien’s picture strikes a similar, though more nurturing theme: a mother, nude and leaning on a pedestal, offers her breast to one infant while two more vie for her attention.

Meanwhile Chast, who has published more than 1,000 cartoons in the New Yorker, mines absurd humor with a cartoon featuring “Super-Man,” a slouchy, mustachioed man holding a tool box who, according to the action bubbles surrounding him “is not afraid of broilers or fuse boxes,” “can fix almost anything,” and “actually has an MFA from Harvard but has never told a soul.” Spiegelman, who throughout his career has wrestled with how comics can confront rising authoritarianism, anchors the show with two works made previously, one of which features seven different versions of Superman (the one in blue and red who wears a cape), one of whom looks like he could have come from a Woody Allen-directed version of the DC Extended Universe.

On the other side of the spectrum hangs a work by Dana Shultz, which looks like an Ab-Ex version of the Übermensch. An abstract figure seems to walk over a mountain, all-powerful arms and legs wrapped in a red suit. But where the face should be lays a swirl of earth tones with a smattering of bright blue. Is she saying that any of us could be his protean hero? Anna Weyant’s contribution, while not abstract, may be the most open-ended. In her picture a blank sheet of letter paper, neatly creased in the middle, sits open on a wooden desk with an envelope and two crumpled, balled-up sheets along side it. Perhaps it’s a letter, one that she’s struggling to write, asking for help from a hero far away, but she can’t find the words.

“Super Duper” is not simply about the art on display. It is about asking whether we can imagine new models of hope, courage, and identity. In a cultural moment dominated by Marvel and DC, the exhibition insists that superheroes need not be mass-produced power fantasies. They can also be fragile, personal, and political; figures that embody vulnerability as much as strength.

While Kazanjian has always used the program to blur the boundary between opera and contemporary art, “Super Duper,” which she curated with philologist Donatien Grau, blasts through the distinction, bringing “low” culture—comics, satire, cartooning—into dialogue with the gilt and marble of Lincoln Center.

“This show, and the operatic version of Kavalier & Clay, are a timely indicator of the fact that comic books have been allowed over that ghetto wall,” Art Spiegelman, the author of Maus, which became the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize, in 1992, told ARTnews. “Not only that, but the wall that once separated high art from low art has become porous. Art is a continuum and superheroes are a part of it.” 

It is an unusual but telling pairing: an opera house that once staged gods and Valkyries now hosts comic book creators and contemporary artists. Both opera and comics are, in their way, devoted to epic storytelling. Here, their mythologies collide.