Wifredo Lam : When I don't sleep, I dream

Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 10 November 2025 – 11 April 2026

Over a career spanning six decades, Wifredo Lam radically expanded the scope of modernism. Born in Cuba, Lam spent most of his life in Spain, France, and Italy, becoming the embodiment of the transnational artist of the 20th century, forging a unique visual style at the crossroads of European modernity and Caribbean and African diasporic cultures. His influence throughout the Black Atlantic region is unparalleled, both as a leading innovator and as an anti-colonialist.

This catalogue of the largest retrospective devoted to the artist in the United States brings together more than 150 works from his prolific career, including paintings, large-scale works on paper, collaborative drawings, illustrated books, prints, ceramics and archives. It includes numerous previously unpublished photographs, analyses of Lam's relationship with surrealism, negritude and other literary, cultural and poetic movements, as well as the first in-depth analysis of the conservation of Lam's most famous painting, La Jungla (1942-1943).