MoMA's Wifredo Lam Exhibit Closing Soon

0:00This is all of it on WNYC, I'm Allison Stewart. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. Spring has sprung and if you're looking for ways to break your winter hibernation, we wanted to let you know that it's your last chance to catch one of our favorite art exhibits at MoMA. It's called with Fredo Lam when I don't sleep, I dream. The exhibit tracks Lam's career from his early training in Madrid and his involvement in the Spanish Civil War to his time in Paris with artists like Picasso, to his creative fruitful return to Cuba. With a semi-surrealist, semi-cubus semi-abstract style, Lam used his work to depict traditional Afro-Caribbean life and spirituality. His work is often colorful and dense and full of interesting faces, creatures, and plants. His artistic practice used his European training to remain grounded in the African diaspora. You can see this work by heading to MoMA between

1:04now and April 11th. With Fredo Lam when I don't sleep, I dream first opened back in November. We had co-curators Christoph Cherriex and Beverly Adams on to talk about it and I started by asking Christoph about the pre-existing relationship between the artist and the museum. It started very early. It started in 1939. So only 10 years after the very founding of the Museum of Modern Art, when its first director, Alfred Ball, visited the first exhibition with Fredo Lam had in Paris at a gallery named Gary Pierre. A very well-known place was also Miros Gary. Lam had his show under the advice of Pablo Picasso, who had met not long ago. What's exceptional is that Alfred Ball acquired a work on the spot, mother and child. A beautiful work from the late 30s made the same year, which now hangs in the exhibition. But he didn't stop

2:07there. There was a commitment for emerging artists, but there was also an international vision. And three years later, Alfred Ball goes to Cuba, visits that mini studio in Havana and acquire a second work, the beautiful Satan, another large gouache. And three years later, in 1945, James Sweeney, acquired for the Museum of Modern Art, a jungle at Pierre Matis Gary, three years. In six years, the museum acquired three key works by an arm. Beverly, for many years, the jungle hung in the lobby of MoMA, not within the galleries. Would you explain why? Well, when it was first exhibited, actually, it did hang in the galleries. It was considered contemporary art, and it hung alongside other contemporary artists, in this big, reinstallation of the museum's galleries. But very soon after that, it kind of fell out of the major narrative that Mamla was trying to put forth on modern art. And it would show up

3:11in exhibitions or galleries of Latin American art or of paintings that were at large scale or like other kinds of thematic things. But most of the time, it greeted people at the entry way of the museum. So I think it was because as the narrative of modernism at the institution became narrower and more of a straight line and arrow through history. They didn't know what to do with this artist. He was a transnational artist. He was from Cuba. He was black. He was Chinese. Made this amazing picture, which they recognize as important, important enough to hang and not keep in storage. But he didn't fit tidally into any of the categories that the museum was trying to create and maintain at that time. And I have to say, this exhibition is beautiful. It's huge, huge. So I tell people, set aside time to go see it. But I understand, Christoph, that some of these works were challenging for the Museum of Modern Art to get, to bring to New York.

4:15What was the most challenging piece for you to acquire? So I think one of the complexity of the project that Lam's work is very much scattered all around the world. So it's an exhibition that brings together 59 lenders, 39 private collectors, 20 institutions. And we really, Beverly and I wanted to go back to drawing boards. Just try to really look at everything we could put our side on and really pick what we felt was the most decisive picture. And one of them, maybe the most challenging of all, was his largest ever-made work, almost 15 foot long, almost mural size, and on paper mounted on canvas, making it very fragile. And that work was so large, so fragile, that he had not been exhibited since the mid-50s. So he became for us absolutely a priority to bring it back and to show it for the first time in New York. Do you have a favorite image, Beverly? You start to thought, most difficult one perhaps

5:21to bring. You know, it's really hard. It's like choosing your favorite child because we worked so long and so hard on this exhibition. And one of the goals of the exhibition was to bring people past the jungle into the later work. And for me, that's been really important. We, the way the installation is, you get to the jungle almost right away. You enter the museum, you look one way, you see the Civil War, you look another way, you see the jungle. And we really wanted people to understand how full and complex and gorgeous his career was. I wanted an amazing art maker he was. So I'd have to say I can't narrow it down to one, but I was thrilled to learn about these works from the late 1950s that verge on abstraction called the Bruce paintings. I had not seen those in person before and it's their first time in New York. So I hope people will be surprised and excited about them as I was when I first saw them. We have to talk about the jungle. This was wild. This is not painted on canvas. That kind of blew my mind. Why did he? Why did he paint this on paper?

6:25Well, his use of paper and it's just playing brown wrapping paper. No, no, no, it's wrapping paper. It was amazing. Well, it starts in Spain. He's trying to paint and make art during the war. And materials are scarce. And what can he get his hands on? He can get his hands on paper. And he's making his own washes. He's like, catch his catch can trying to make art, but he doesn't have the money or the availability of materials. And when he paints Spanish Civil War, this great picture in 1937, he gets to scale by piecing two large pieces of this brown paper together. And then when he goes back to Cuba, when he wants to paint a statement painting, a big picture, he still doesn't have any canvas. And so he goes back to this wrapping paper, not some very fancy like artist paper, but this brown craft paper. And for him, it becomes this touchstone. He actually falls in love with this material. And he goes back to it every time we see this sort of great statement or experimentation. Grand Composition, his largest picture that

7:29Christoph was talking about earlier, is also on this paper, as are the Bruce pictures. So it really becomes something that's kind of freedom for him to work on this material with this material. Those are the practical aspects I can afford this material. I can afford to use it. Let's talk about his spirituality a little bit, Christoph. How does spiritual influences, how do we see it in his art? I think we see, I think first there's a sense of, again, a sense of purpose, a sense of civic engagement. The idea that art is not just about art itself. Art is also for calls. And how is going to bring together very, very powerful motif that talked to about that, about the mission of art to transcend art itself and to be about our contemporary lives. And you'll see in his work, particularly in Cuba, a number of

8:31motifs that really come directly out of the Cuban religions, the Afro-Caribbean religion. You can even identify not, and he's going to play with those motif, integrate them within his own vocabulary. So creating a world that's both immersive, magical, but also deeply, deeply collected to a sense of faith. And you see, although that earlier in Spain is attracted by the way, we can use very powerful motifs that allow to bring people into a new world. And the jungle is very much about that. It's sugarcane, and between the sugarcane, you'll see those extraordinarily creature. You know if they're friendly or they could be a little bit hostile, and you have to catch them to find them, the creatures of the night sometimes. And they brings a viewer into a place that was completely unexpected. You mentioned the latter work, which seems a little spookier than his previous work. What was going on in his life when he was creating

9:35the work in his later years? I think the big break actually comes in 1946. He's spent the war in Cuba. He's been showing the whole time in New York City. And when he's finally able to travel again, he goes first to New York, then shows in London some works that he had done, while he was in Haiti, where he'd exhibited, and then goes back to Paris. And post-war Europe really kind of, for lack of a better word, freaks him out. He sees the demonstration. He's just like, oh my god, I can't believe this. And he thought, well, maybe you would go back and continue his career that he had left in Paris in 1940. And he's not happy. Another thing he sees there, which impacts him, I think greatly, is he sees his friend, Emma says there, who he had met in Martinique on his way back to Cuba. But he also sees African art being sold like bobbles in the street. And he sees the separation between the cultural production of these people from Africa,

10:37divorced from its context, its spiritual context, its day-to-day context, its life and meaning. And that really impacts him a lot. So when he returns to Cuba after this trip, he has a lot to digest, but one of the things that he states in some very powerful letters that he writes, is that he doesn't want to be objectified like that, and he wants to sort of find a way to recontextualize African art of the diaspora in a new kind of way. So he abandons colorful, tropical, light and plants and makes these darker, more brooding compositions, but they are very theatrical and very stately and sort of, I don't know, there's that kind of epicness to them because they're so theatrical that I think is motivated by this trip back to Europe in 1946. That was my conversation with co-curators Christos Jarek's and Beverly Adams.

11:40The show is called with Fred Olam when I don't sleep, I dream, and you can catch it at MoMA through April 11th. Coming up, comedian Jeff Ross talks about his Broadway debut, a one-man show called Take a Banana for the Ride, which was recently added to Netflix. That's coming up, this is all of it.