The Modern Art Notes Podcast · Tyler Green

Wifredo Lam, Yoko Ono

December 19, 2025·1 hr 12 min·7 clips

Wilfredo Lam created over 400 paintings in just seven years after finally finding a studio to work in.

Wifredo Lam arrives through geography. Green introduces When I Don't Sleep, I Dream as a MoMA retrospective of more than 130 works from the 1920s to the 1970s, with Lam framed as a Cuban-born artist whose life ran through Spain, France, and Italy as well as Cuba. Beverly Adams takes over where the episode gets good: inside the pictures. Her reading tracks how the late-1940s work changes pictorial structure. Landscape drops back. The figures do not vanish into abstraction, though. They hold a strange, inward kind of ground without settling into a literal place. The paper matters. Adams describes brown paper as ground and figure at once, so unpainted bodies come out of the same surface that keeps the picture together. Against a dark background, forms seem to turn into other forms and connect along a frieze-like ground line. Adams identifies the left-hand form as probably a femme cheval, or horsewoman, tied to Lam's late-1940s vocabulary and earlier beginnings in Marseille. Possession is not treated like a distant theme. The conversation follows how Lam makes being written by a spirit feel bodily, unstable, and visible. Portraiture hangs around too, with seated female figures recalling three-quarter-length poses and hands in laps while their bodies refuse to stay ordinary. Green mostly frames the exhibition, catalog, dates, and show-page material, then lets Adams's looking do the work. Yoko Ono enters later through Jamila James, who talks about generosity, vocal space, politics, ethics, and social practice inside institutions. James also connects that invitation to public work, including Peace is Power and the 1969 War Is Over context with John. Both segments care about transformation: Lam inside the image, Ono in voice and public space.

As heard by us

A close-looking museum episode on Lam's transformations and Ono's public invitations.

Tyler Green opens with Wifredo Lam at MoMA, where Beverly Adams treats the retrospective as a way to see an artist moving across Cuba, Spain, France, and Italy without settling into a single national frame.

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Why you'd press play

If you want two museum conversations that stay close to the work and the thinking behind it.

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