The Museum of Modern Art’s Wifredo Lam retrospective, “When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream,” one of the more hotly anticipated fall exhibitions, will not feature artworks from the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana. According to a recent report in the New York Times, MoMa failed to secure the loan as the Havana museum worried that any artworks entering the United States could be seized by a US court “as part of claims by Cuban exiles and others seeking compensation for property confiscated in the revolution.”
“When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream” is set to feature 150 artworks from throughout the Afro-Cuban Surrealist’s life, and is curated by Christophe Cherix—who was promoted to director of MoMA as the exhibition was being organized—and Beverly Adams, the museum’s curator of Latin American art.
The Times article details the “expensive, complicated” three-year process Cherix and Adams undertook to bring many of these rarely exhibited paintings and drawings to New York. The issue escalated this past January, when one of President Trump’s first actions on the day of his inauguration was to reinstate Cuba’s designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism, which had been briefly rescinded by President Joe Biden.
Related Articles
The Times article highlights several successes for the curatorial team: They persuaded an unnamed Parisian collector to sell to MoMA an oil-and-charcoal work on paper, Grande Composition, 1949 (the largest artwork Lam ever made), from his vestibule, where it had hung for two decades; they used infrared spectroscopy to determine that The Jungle, 1942–43, was made with oil, rather than gouache; and they rediscovered long-lost artworks like Harpe Astrale and La Guerra Civil.
“Wifredo Lam: When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream” is on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Nov. 10, 2025–Apr. 11, 2026.