Wifredo Lam (1902 - 1982) was an Afro-Cuban artist known for bringing Afro-Cuban culture to the forefront of the art world. Lam was born to a Congolese and Cuban “mulatto” mother and a Chinese father in the African neighborhood of Sagua La Grande. Although his family and neighbors were Catholic, Lam’s maternal grandmother was a Santeria priestess. In 1916, he left to Havana to study law but soon began studying tropical plants at the Botanical Garden and then enrolled at the Escuela de Bellas Artes (School of Fine Arts) in 1918. Lam was not fond of academic teaching and left to study art in Madrid in 1923. In Spain, he studied under Fernando Álavarez de Sotomayor y Zaragoza, the curator of the Museo del Prado and former teacher of Salvador Dalί. During this time, Lam was greatly inspired by the studies of political corruption, and he went on to use his own work as a way of condemning the horrors of war.
In 1929, Lam married Eva Piriz but after only two years, she and their infant son died from tuberculosis. This is said to have a profound effect on the haunting nature of his work.
He moved to Paris in 1938, where Pablo Picasso took him under his wing and introduced him to European art movements including Cubism, Surrealism, and Primitivism. While European Modernism had a significant impact on his artistic style, it was a trip to Cuba in 1941 that would inspire his distinctive style. Shocked to see how the African population was exploited and treated, Lam sought to conserve and revere the African culture of Cuba through his works during this time. An example of this is his best-known work, The Jungle, 1943. In 1964, he was awarded the Guggenheim International Award, and a year after his death in 1982, the Wifredo Lam Center for Contemporary Art opened in Havana, Cuba.
Wifredo Lam's work has commanded seven figures on the secondary market and can be found in the collections of the MoMA, the Guggenheim Museum, the Tate, the Centre Pompidou, and the Museo Reina Sofia among others.