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Wifredo Lam: Multicultural Modernist
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10776 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1993 |
2,253 Words |
| Author
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Jason Edward Kaufman
Jason Edward Kaufman is an art historian and critic based in
New York. |
The present mood in the United States and much of Europe calls for "multiculturalism," a term that connotes an attitude of mutual tolerance and understanding as a way to resolve differences between peoples of different backgrounds. The Cuban-born artist Wifredo Lam was a paragon of cultural blending: His heritage was mixed, he called many places home, he married women of diverse ethnicity, and he invented a distinctly multicultural visual language to conjure cross-cultural religious beliefs. Furthermore, Lam is one of Latin America's most famous artists, his name among a select group that includes Figari, Torres-Garcia, River, Kahlo, Siquieros, Orozco, Matta, and Soto. So it makes perfect sense that a decade after his death in 1982 he is receiving an international tribute in museums in the United States and Spain.
Three current exhibitions afford an opportunity to reconsider Lam's art as an individual and a uniquely Afro-Cuban achievements, and to view it in the context of the twentieth-century avant-grade. Wifredo Lam and His Contemporaries, 1938-1952 is at the Studio Museum in Harlem until April 11. The two other exhibitions are in Barcelona through March 28--Wifredo Lam: A Retrospective of Works on Paper at La Caixa Foundation, and Wifredo Lam at the Fundacio Miro.
Wifredo Oscar de la Concepcion Lam y Castilla (1902-1982) was the youngest of nine children and the only son of a Chinese father and a mulatto mother of Spanish and African descent. Though his father adhered to Confucius and Laotzu, his mother raised him as a Roman Catholic. And had his godmother Mantonica Wilson had her way, young Lam would have become a Santeria priest-healer. She herself was a santera priestess and instructed her godson in the Afro-Christian
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