www.RealSalvatorMundi.com
About Us
About The Museum
Taking its name from the world's most expensive work of art, the purported lost masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci, the Salvator Mundi Museum of Art is dedicated to exploring all aspects, implications and ramifications from the Salvator Mundi story and art history.
On November 15, 2017, history was made when a painting titled Salvator Mundi, attributed to the great renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci, completely shattered all records by selling at Christie's auction house in NYC for just over 450 million dollars. The painting, dated from around 1500 and lost for many years, was thought to be rediscovered in 2005 underneath multiple layers of overpainting, torn and decayed by worm holes. Over the next 6 years it was meticulously reworked and restored led by conservation expert Diane Dwyer Modestini at New York University.
This museum houses one of the largest private collections of art and ephemera surrounding the Salvator Mundi story and regularly mounts exhibitions on a multitude of related areas of study.
The Museum is approximately 45 sqft. in total and is viewable through the exhibition space glass area. Private tours are available on request.
About the Salvator Mundi Museum of Art
The Salvator Mundi Museum of Art (SMMoA) is a unique contemporary art project founded by artist Elliott Arkin, taking its name from the extraordinary story of Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi, the world's most expensive painting.
Through art, satire, and cultural commentary, the museum explores the intersection of art, commerce, celebrity, and belief. The museum is part of the larger Salvator Mundi® brand, registered trademarks, and conceptual art project.
Its intimate Brooklyn setting challenges conventional expectations of what constitutes a museum, inviting visitors to reconsider the relationship between art, institutions, authenticity, and value.
With Salvator Munddhi (Heal Me), the museum inaugurates an annual program inviting contemporary artists to transform the space through their own interpretations of the Salvator Mundi story.
The Salvator Mundi will forever be the subject of much interest, intrigue, mystery, and debate. However, there is only one Real Salvator Mundi (TM).
Board of Advisors:
Lawrence B. Benenson
Donya Bommer
Dr. Hugh Marlais Davies - Director Emeritus, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
Robert Storr
Stephane Van Deun & Montserrat Uben
Coco & Ben Van Meerendonk
Current Exhibition
SALVATOR MUNDDHI (HEAL ME)
Artist Marc Lafia Transforms the Salvator Mundi Museum of Art into a Contemporary Shrine of Buddha, Artificial Intelligence, and the Search for Salvation
Brooklyn, New York — October 14, 2026 — In the tiny sanctuary of the Salvator Mundi Museum of Art (SMMoA), Leonardo da Vinci's Savior of the World undergoes an unexpected transformation, reimagined by artist Marc Lafia as the Salvator Buddha.
The resulting exhibition, Salvator Munddhi (Heal Me), brings together Eastern and Western traditions of salvation, contemporary technology, and artificial intelligence in a provocative meditation on humanity's enduring search for healing and enlightenment.
The exhibition inaugurates the museum's Annual Artist Residency Exhibition, a new initiative inviting a contemporary artist each year to reinterpret the extraordinary story, imagery, and cultural legacy of Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi.
Marc Lafia’s exhibition will coincide with his participation in the upcoming November exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art – artport: a history of internet art and the publication of his new book, Recording Ourselves.
A Shrine. A Machine. A Mirror.
The original Salvator Mundi—Leonardo da Vinci's image of Christ holding the world in his hand—has become one of the great symbols of our era's contradictions: faith and commerce, transcendence and ownership, mystery and spectacle. Famously sold at Christie's in 2017 for more than $450 million, the painting remains the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction.
In Lafia's installation, the orb leaves the hand of the Savior and proliferates into a constellation of small technological bodies: restored Panasonic Panapet radios, transformed into vessels transmitting voices from an unseen realm.
Surrounded by a garden of Buddhas and illuminated by a neon invocation—HEAL ME—the installation creates a contemporary shrine for a moment of collective uncertainty and distress.
Step closer to the radios, however, and the nature of the shrine changes: the voice answering the request is not divine. It is artificial.
Through AI-generated speech, the work stages a conversation between ancient desires for salvation and the emerging presence of computational intelligence. The voice speaks from the archive of humanity, carrying our histories, our dreams, our fears, and our contradictions. It does not experience suffering. It does not know mortality. It does not love. Yet it reflects back the traces of everything we have created.
Salvator Munddhi asks what happens when the ancient human search for healing encounters a new form of intelligence—one that cannot save us, but can reveal us.
A shrine. A machine. A mirror.
A prayer addressed to the future.
The Museum's First Annual Artist Residency
Founded by conceptual artist Elliott Arkin, the Salvator Mundi Museum of Art is itself part of a larger conceptual art project encompassing the Salvator Mundi® brand, registered trademarks, and an evolving body of artworks exploring the intersection of art, commerce, celebrity, and belief.
With the inauguration of its Annual Artist Residency Exhibition, the museum opens its intimate space to other contemporary artists, inviting them to expand upon the themes and possibilities of the Salvator Mundi story.
Reflecting on his choice of Lafia as the inaugural artist, Arkin explains:
"I've been intrigued by Marc's early performance works—like Everything is Everything and There's Nothing Else—and his deep engagement with cultural anthropology, art history, and cross-cultural painting traditions. With his upcoming exhibition at the Whitney and his new book, it felt like the perfect moment to collaborate as longtime friends.
"I've decided to hand the museum over to an artist once a year, and Marc's extraordinary cycle of The Practicing Human—moving across Asia and the Middle East to examine how civilization forges culture, knowledge, and beauty—made him the ideal inaugural artist."
About Marc Lafia
Marc Lafia is an artist, filmmaker, and writer whose work for more than three decades has explored the changing relationship between perception, technology, and culture.
Working across photography, cinema, performance, computation, and networked media, his work often takes the medium itself as its subject.
His recent book, Recording Ourselves, extends this investigation through an ongoing dialogue with ChatGPT, exploring what happens when a computational medium formed from the vast archive of recorded human experience begins to speak back to us, becoming a participant in the experience it has inherited.
Lafia's work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate, and ZKM Karlsruhe, and has been exhibited internationally. He will also participate in an upcoming exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art – artport: a history of internet art in November 2026.
MEDIA CONTACT
Salvator Mundi Museum of Art
144 Union Street, Brooklyn, NY 11231
(929) 365-9680
RealSalvatorMundi@gmail.com
www.SalvatorMundiMuseum.org
Hours Of Operation
The Salvator Mundi Museum of Art is open daily from 9am until 10pm. Private tours available upon request.
We hope to see you soon.
Come Visit Us :
Salvator Mundi Museum Of Art
144 Union Street
Brooklyn, New York 11231