NSU Art Museum: Stanley and Pearl Goodman Lecture on American Art

Saturday, January 26th from 2-3pm join Boston College Hispanic Studies professor Elizabeth Thompson Goizueta at the NSU Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale as she discusses Wifredo Lam’s fascination with the ceramic medium and his inspiration from Pablo Picasso and CoBrA artists. The museum hosts the Annual Stanley and Pearl Goodman Lecture on Latin American Art: Earth, Water and Fire in the Ceramics of Wifredo Lam and Cobra. FREE for museum members, $10 for non-members. RSVP here. Program generously sponsored by Ramón and Nercys Cernuda.

In 1938, Cuban artist Wifredo Lam arrived in Paris where he quickly gained the support of Pablo Picasso and was inspired by the dreamlike work of the Surrealists. When he returned to Cuba (1941 to 1951), he created some of his most expressive works of art, fusing Surrealism and Magic Realism to create a hybrid style that would signal a new direction for Modern art in Latin America.

In the 1950s, he joined his friend, the Danish painter Asger Jorn, a founder of the post-World War II avant-garde art movement CoBrA, in the Italian coastal town Albissola, where they and other CoBrA artists worked in the historic ceramic workshops. Lam became so consumed by this medium that he returned to Albissola multiple times, eventually buying a house there in 1961. Lam created some 300 ceramic pieces in the last twenty-five years of his life.