Professor Jean Khalfa advises on MoMA’s Wifredo Lam exhibition

Trinity Fellow Professor Jean Khalfa will attend the private view of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition Wifredo Lam: When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream, which he advised on. This major new exhibition opens next week in New York after three years in the making.

Wifredo Lam (1902-1982), a Cuban and French artist of African and Chinese ancestry, is known as a Surrealist, a contemporary of Picasso and an artist who expressed the Afro-Cuban experience.

The MoMA exhibition, which includes works rarely seen and newly acquired by the museum, makes the case that Lam has significantly expanded and transformed modernism.

Wifredo Lam is known for his paintings, often, like his most famous work ‘The Jungle’, oils on paper mounted on canvas. Less familiar are his print works. Professor Khalfa has been keen to promote this aspect of Lam’s creativity and, thanks also to alumni support, the Wren Library has the most comprehensive collection in the world of Lam’s artist’s books, created jointly with major poets and printers from the 1950s to the 1970s.

Professor Khalfa is editor and author of Wifredo Lam, Livres d’artiste/Artist’s books (Jean-Michel Place 2025) a bilingual book in which experts explore the history, thought processes and techniques behind these partnerships, highlighting the crucial roles played by engravers, printers, and publishers.

Professor Khalfa’s edited book will be among the publications in the MoMA bookshop during the exhibition, which runs from 10 November 2025 to 11 April 2026.

As part of the extensive research conducted by the MOMA exhibition curators Beverly Adams and Christophe Cherix, Professor Khalfa attended a two-day workshop at the museum with Lam specialists from Europe, Cuba and the Americas last autumn.

Professor Khalfa contributed to the exhibition catalogue, writing about a portfolio by Lam and the Martinique poet and politician, Aimé Césaire, which is part of the Lam collection in the Wren Library.

Following events at MoMA, which include a private view for Trinity alumni, Professor Khalfa will take part in the launch of an exhibition he is co-organising in the Historical Library of the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris of manuscripts, prints and documents, in particular letters from Lam to Cesaire in the early 1940s.

He said: ‘I wrote for the labels a number of notes and clarifications as to the characters Lam mentions, some very significant such as Alfred Barr, the first director of MoMA who came to meet Lam in Cuba during the war. A true visionary.

These are fascinating documents which confirm the hypotheses made by the curators of the new exhibition and place Lam squarely as a precursor of the art to come rather than an inheritor (of Picasso and of Surrealism) as is often said (though Lam was faithful to his friends, Picasso, Breton, Césaire all his life).’

The Annonciation portfolio from the Wren Library will be displayed at the ENS exhibition.

Early this year Professor Khalfa and Dr Carlos Fonseca hosted special guests in the Wren Library, including Lam’s eldest son, Eskil Lam, for an event attended by nearly 80 students, staff and Fellows.

Art historians Jacques Leenhardt, Gabriela Rangel and Jose Manuel Noceda discussed Lam’s collaborations with poets, including Aimé Césaire, René Char, Jacques Dupin and Édouard Glissant, to create his large-format books.

 

Wifredo LAM – Livres d’artiste/ Artist’s Books – Jean-Michel Place éditeur is designed by Ruedi Bar and co-published by Jean-Michel Place and Sylvie Glissant, Director of the Institut du Tout-Monde.

Wifredo Lam: When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream, MoMA, 10 November 2025 to 11 April 2026.  

Find out more about the life of Wifredo Lam: The Power of Art, Exile and Transformation.

“We are among those who say no to the shadows” Aimé Césaire, poetry and commitment 1935-1956, ENS, 14 November 2025 – 10 January 2026.