Wifredo Lam: When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream

A sweeping retrospective of the innovative and influential Cuban artist, bringing his work into dialogue with new perspectives in art history

Over a career spanning six decades, Wifredo Lam radically expanded the purview of modernism. Born in Cuba, Lam spent most of his life in Spain, France, and Italy, and came to embody the figure of the transnational artist in the 20th century, forging a unique visual style at the confluence of European modernity and Caribbean and African diasporic cultures. The extent of his influence throughout the Black Atlantic is unrivaled as both a leading innovator and an anti-colonialist.

Published in conjunction with the most extensive retrospective devoted to the artist in the United States, Wifredo Lam: When I Don't Sleep, I Dream brings together more than 150 works from his prolific career-including paintings, large-scale works on paper, collaborative drawings, illustrated books, prints, ceramics, and archival material. This landmark publication features extensive new photography; trenchant insights into Lam's relationship to Surrealism, Negritude, and other literary, cultural, and poetic movements; and the first in-depth conservation analysis of Lam's best-known painting, The Jungle (1942-43).