In 1961 Alfred H. Barr Jr., director of collections at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), was invited to select a painting by a contemporary Canadian artist for the MoMA permanent collection. Barr selected Kurelek’s Hailstorm in Alberta.

The painting is a notable early example of Kurelek’s ability to create imagery resistant to reductive interpretations of his work as representing quaint, humorous childhood memories of Western Canada. The ambivalence of the natural world toward the affairs and values of humans would become a crucial theme in Kurelek’s later work.