“The Museum of Modern Art presents Wifredo Lam: When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream, the most extensive retrospective devoted to the artist in the United States, on view at MoMA from November 10, 2025, through April 11, 2026. Spanning the six decades of Lam’s prolific career, the exhibition includes more than 130 artworks from the 1920s to the 1970s—including paintings, large-scale works on paper, collaborative drawings, illustrated books, prints, ceramics, and archival material—with key loans from the Estate of Wifredo Lam, Paris. The retrospective reveals how Lam—a Cubanborn artist who spent most of his life in Spain, France, and Italy—came to embody the figure of the transnational artist in the 20th century. Wifredo Lam: When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream is organized by Christophe Cherix, The David Rockefeller Director, and Beverly Adams, The Estrellita Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art, with Damasia Lacroze, Curatorial Associate, Department of Painting and Sculpture, and Eva Caston, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints.” — The Museum of Modern Art

“Lam’s visionary commitment to making his painting an ‘act of decolonization,’ as he put it, forever changed modern art,” said Cherix. “He insisted on placing diasporic culture at the heart of modernism—not as a peripheral influence, but as central, a generative force.”

“His radically inventive works continue to speak to us across time,” said Adams. “The realities he confronted—colonialism, racism, exile, and displacement—remain as urgent today as they were in his lifetime.”

Titlle image: Installation view of Wifredo Lam: When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, from November 10, 2025, through April 11, 2026. Photo by Jonathan Dorado.

Images courtesy The Museum of Modern Art.