Born in 1902 in a sugar-cane harvesting region of Cuba, Wifredo Lam (1902-1982) was a transatlantic artist whose mixed heritage as the son of a Chinese immigrant father and Afro-Cuban mother shaped his distinct Surrealist work. Lam had a profound influence on Cuban artists. Lam’s adoption of Afro-Cuban rituals, the reclaiming of African identity, the celebration of the tropical landscape, the use of coded emblems of social and political protest, and the stylization of abstracted hybrid personages are evident in the works on view in this exhibition. Most of all, Lam’s fame as a transnational artist was a source of pride and an example of how art transcends national borders. As artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons (b. 1959) stated on the occasion of Lam’s recent retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, “When I was young, we were all trying to be Lam.”