There are moments in the life of museums when an exhibition does more than bring together a celebrated body of work; it shifts an axis. Wifredo Lam: When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream at the Museum of Modern Art reminds us that modernism was never a monolith — and that the imagination, when rooted in identity and resistance, can truly reshape history. As When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream brings his vision into focus, it’s more than a retrospective: it’s a reckoning.
For years, Lam’s name appeared in conversations about Surrealism, cubist experimentation, and Caribbean visual culture, yet the precision of his artistic project — and the radical nature of his imagination — was often blurred by categories too narrow to hold him. This exhibition refuses those inherited limitations. Instead, it positions Lam as a visionary who understood early on that modernism was not a Western phenomenon to be imitated, but a global terrain demanding reinvention.
Born in Cuba to African and Chinese ancestry, Lam carried within him multiple cosmologies, histories, and cultural vocabularies. His years in Europe honed his discipline; his return to the Caribbean ignited his imagination. In that return — after nearly two decades abroad — his work found its singular force: a visual language capable of bearing the weight of spiritual knowledge, political resistance, and mythic memory. Lam once described his art as an “act of decolonization” — a phrase that today feels both prescient and deeply resonant. His paintings were not simply pictures to be decoded, but propositions about how to see a world fractured by empire yet rich with ancestral presence.
