Issue link: https://www.balharbourdigital.com/i/1541556
No matter where winter adventures take you—from the beaches of Miami to the slopes of Utah—there's an exhibition worth detouring for. BY KAT HERRIMAN art takes a holiday A BL AST FROM THE PAST: THE WIFREDO L AM STORY, NEW YORK The title of Wifredo Lam's new exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art—"When I Don't Sleep, I Dream"—reads like a manifesto. It reminds us that dreams aren't passive, hazy states, but rather engines of change. To imagine is to act. Lam was one of those rare artists who could fuse vision with movement, transforming imagination into architecture, conjuring a modernism rooted not in Europe's fantasies of cultural dominance of the Other, but in the psychic terrain of the colonized and displaced. Born in Cuba to a Chinese father and a mother of African and Spanish descent, Lam carried the world inside him. His life zigzagged from Havana to Madrid and Paris, and back across the Atlantic—a circuit of exile and return that shaped both his politics and his poetics. The exhibition, organized by Christophe Cherix and Beverly Adams, honors that fluidity. Rather than tracing a tidy biography, it follows Lam's transformations—how he bent Cubism to his will, folded Surrealism into Santería, and used painting to stage collisions between the truth of myth and the falsity of modernity. Where a 2016 Tate Modern retrospective charted Lam's global influence and introduced him to many, MoMA's iteration zooms in on Lam's use of decolonization as a creative strategy. Lam once famously wrote: "My painting is an act of decolonization, not in a physical sense, but in a mental one." Through more than 130 works— paintings, drawings, prints, and ceramics—the show reveals Lam's contributions as both agitator and dreamer, a painter who turned hybrid identity into aesthetic resistance. It reminds us that the term decolonization is not a recent phenomenon but a history of action. At the core of the show is The Jungle (1942-43), a MoMA icon seen anew. Long interpreted as a dreamscape, it now feels like an act of awakening—its tangle of limbs, sugarcane, and masks reanimating histories that modernism tried to forget. Through April 11, 2026; moma.org Wifredo Lam in his Havana studio, 1943, with La jungla (The Jungle), 1942–43, left; La mañana verde (The Green Morning), 1943, right; and on the floor, La silla (The Chair), 1943 Lam's La guerra civil (The Spanish Civil War), 1937 A R C H I V E S S D O W I F R E D O L A M , PA R I S /C O U R T E S Y O F M O M A ; © S U C C E S S I O N W I F R E D O L A M , A DAG P, PA R I S /A R S , N E W YO R K 2 0 2 5 BALHAR B O U RSH O P S .CO M