Afro-Cuban Art: Wifredo Lam and Santería

Afro-Cuban art is the body of Cuban work built on African religious and cultural inheritance, and Wifredo Lam's The Jungle is its landmark: a painting finished in 1943 that put the spirit world of Santería at the center of modernism instead of the margins.

That sounds like a small distinction. It isn't. European modernism had already been mining African art for thirty years by the time Lam got to work, and it took the masks while leaving the people who made them out of the story. Lam did the opposite, on purpose, and said so out loud.

Who was Wifredo Lam?

He was born in 1902 in Sagua la Grande, a sugar town in central Cuba. His father was a Chinese immigrant. His mother descended from both Spanish colonists and enslaved Africans, which put three of the island's populations in one household.

Lam moved to Havana in 1916, started out toward a law career, and ended up at the School of Fine Arts instead. A scholarship took him to the Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, where he trained under the portraitist Fernando Álvarez de Sotomayor and spent his real education inside the Prado, looking hard at Velázquez, Bosch and Goya. Goya's work on political corruption stuck with him.

Then came a decade that would have stopped most people. In 1931 he lost his first wife and their infant son to tuberculosis. In 1936 he fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. He reached Paris in 1938, where Picasso took him up and introduced him to André Breton, Joan Miró and the Surrealist circle. Two years later the Germans occupied the city and he had to run.

He boarded a ship at Marseille in March 1941. The crossing stopped in Martinique, where he met the poet Aimé Césaire, and he finally reached Havana in the summer of 1941 after eighteen years away. The Art Institute of Chicago's curatorial file makes the point that this wasn't exile for Lam the way New York was exile for Breton. He was going home. The work he'd done in Europe turned out to have been preparation.

What is Santería, and why is the name contested?

Between 500,000 and 700,000 Africans were brought to Cuba in bondage, most of them in the nineteenth century, and they came from a wider range of African origins than in any other society in the Americas. Slavery on the island didn't effectively end until 1886, which is late. That lateness matters, because it meant African languages, rituals, music and cosmology were still being practiced by people who had lived them firsthand, well into the era of photography and modern art.

The Yoruba deities are called orishas. In Cuba, as in Haiti, they were paired with Roman Catholic saints so they could survive a system that banned them outright. Changó, who rules lightning, was identified with St. Barbara. Ogún, the blacksmith, with St. George. Babalú Ayé with St. Lazarus.

Because of that pairing, the practice has long been called Santería, meaning the way of the saints. Harvard's Pluralism Project notes that many practitioners now reject the term, since it foregrounds the Catholic overlay and pushes the African foundation into the background. La Regla de Lukumí and La Regla de Ocha-Ifá are the names increasingly preferred from inside the tradition. Most of the art-historical writing on Lam still says Santería, so this piece does too, but the objection is worth knowing before you repeat the word.

Lam's connection to it wasn't academic. His godmother, Mantonica Wilson, was a priestess of Changó, known locally as a healer. She's the first door he walked through. The second was Lydia Cabrera, the Cuban writer and ethnographer, who reconnected him with Afro-Cuban spiritual practice after he came home and also found him a house in Havana where he could work.

What's actually happening in The Jungle?

The physical facts first, because they explain a lot.

Lam glued two large sheets of kraft paper together to make his support, sketched the composition in charcoal, then built it up in thinned oil. The finished piece is oil and charcoal on paper mounted on canvas, 94 1/4 by 90 1/2 inches, roughly eight feet square. MoMA acquired it in 1945 through the Inter-American Fund. It's catalogued in the Department of Drawings and Prints, not Painting and Sculpture, which is its own small piece of institutional history. The paper support is fragile enough that the work can't travel.

According to the Art Institute of Chicago's research, Lam painted it in about twenty days, between December 1942 and January 1943, after roughly fifty preparatory gouaches. One of those related studies is in Chicago's own collection.

Four elongated figures stand among the stalks. Their faces read as African masks. Their feet look like hands. They carry both male and female attributes at once, and their limbs merge into the vegetation around them so you can't always tell where a body stops and a leaf starts.

Here's the part most people miss. It isn't a jungle. MoMA's own gallery label describes a Caribbean landscape of broadleaves, tropical fruit and sugarcane, and calls out what cane means in Cuba: slavery and indenture. The setting is a cane field, which is a plantation, which is the engine that brought those 500,000 people across the water in the first place. Lam was fairly direct about the title being a device. "I was always worried about stealing from another culture," he said, "but I decided that there was an answer: to put that culture which I knew and loved in a natural context. That is where the jungle comes in."

How did Santería iconography get into the paint?

Through the body, mostly, and through one image in particular.

In Santería, possession is described as riding. The orisha mounts the practitioner, and the practitioner is the horse. That's the source of the femme cheval, the horse-headed woman who recurs across Lam's work for the rest of his life. She isn't a surrealist mashup of animal and person. She's a picture of a specific religious event, drawn by someone whose godmother presided over it.

The mask-like faces work the same way. They aren't quotations of West African sculpture the way a 1907 Paris canvas would quote it. They're the faces of beings who belong in the landscape they're standing in.

You can see the logic get more explicit in later work. In The Eternal Present, painted in 1944, the figures have been read as Oshun, the orisha of love and rivers, standing with the warrior deities Elegua and Ogun. Lam himself said the woman on the left stood for "the paradise that foreigners seek in Cuba, a land of pleasures and sickly-sweet music," which tells you he was thinking about tourism and exploitation at the same time as theology.

He stated the method plainly. "In The Jungle and in other works I have tried to relocate Black cultural objects in terms of their own landscape and in relation to their own world." And more bluntly, in a line MoMA still quotes: his painting was "an act of decolonization."

That word choice wasn't loose. Lam illustrated Retorno al país natal, Lydia Cabrera's Spanish translation of Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, published in Havana by Molina y Cía in an edition of 300 copies. It's the founding poem of Négritude, and the Havana edition carried it into Spanish for the first time. Lam, Césaire and Cabrera were running the same argument in three different media at once. If you want the broader movement that grew out of it, we've written about Pan-African art and the ideas behind it separately.

Why did MoMA hang it by the coat check?

Because the museum didn't know where to file it.

The Jungle went on view in a collection gallery from June 1945 to January 1946. After that it moved to the entry lobby, and it stayed in that general vicinity for decades. No admission required to see it. The painter Kerry James Marshall has written about visiting MoMA from Harlem specifically to look at it, hanging off the lobby near the coat check.

Prominent and excluded at the same time. Everybody who came in saw the thing, and it was never quite inside the story the museum was telling about modern art. In December 1988 the poet and critic John Yau published an essay called "Please Wait by the Coatroom" in Arts Magazine, taking MoMA apart for isolating the painting from its own narrative of modernism and skipping over who Lam actually was. The museum took the painting down in response.

The correction has been slow and it's still going. In 2019 the work was included in Among Others: Blackness at MoMA, the first time in eighty years of ownership that Lam's work had been examined in that frame by the institution holding it. From November 2025 to April 2026 MoMA mounted the first retrospective in the United States covering the full arc of his career.

Eighty years is a long time to get around to a painting you already own.

What does any of this have to do with the art in your house?

More than it looks like, because Lam's problem is still the problem.

He was working out how to use a culture without stripping it. His answer was context: put the imagery back in the world it came from, credit the tradition, name the people. That's a standard you can apply as a buyer without knowing a thing about Surrealism. Who made this. What's their relationship to the material. Does the seller name them, or does the listing just say "African-inspired," which is a phrase doing a lot of quiet work. We've broken down the difference between African-inspired and actually attributed art if you want the checklist version.

Noirci Studio doesn't sell Afro-Cuban modernism, and it can't sell you a Lam. What it sells is African American art on archival canvas, printed to order in the United States, by artists who get a royalty on every sale, including founder Robert Lawrence, who has been painting since 2006. Different tradition, same principle: a person made it, that person is named, and that person gets paid. If you're building a wall around diaspora heritage rather than a mood board, the civil rights art collection is the place to start, and our guide to displaying diaspora art at home covers the hanging side of it.

Lam spent a career arguing that Black cultural material belongs to the world that produced it, and that art made from the inside carries something borrowed art never will. Eighty years on, the argument holds up fine. It just moved from museum walls to product pages.

Sources

• The Museum of Modern Art, Wifredo Lam, "La jungla (The Jungle)," collection record: medium, dimensions (94 1/4 x 90 1/2 inches), Inter-American Fund credit line, object number 140.1945, Department of Drawings and Prints, and the gallery label describing the kraft paper support, mask-derived faces, and the cane-field setting tied to Cuba's history of slavery and indenture.
• Beverly Adams and Christophe Cherix, "A World Ahead," MoMA Magazine, excerpt from the exhibition catalogue: the painting's display history from 1945 onward, the lobby placement, Kerry James Marshall's account, John Yau's 1988 Arts Magazine essay and MoMA's response, Lydia Cabrera's role in reconnecting Lam with Afro-Cuban practice, the Retorno al país natal collaboration, and Lam's quotation about putting the culture in a natural context.
• The Art Institute of Chicago, Wifredo Lam, "Study for 'The Jungle'" (1942), object record and curatorial entry: Lam's March 1941 departure from Marseille and arrival in Havana, his Chinese and Afro-Spanish parentage, the 1923 move to Spain and 1938 move to Paris, his acquaintance with Fernando Ortiz and Lydia Cabrera, Mantonica Wilson as a Santería priestess, the end of Cuban slavery in 1886, and the twenty-day execution of The Jungle between December 1942 and January 1943.
• Tate, "Who is Wifredo Lam?": birth in Sagua la Grande, the 1916 move to Havana, the San Fernando scholarship and Prado study, the 1931 deaths of his wife and infant son, the Spanish Civil War, the 1941 return after eighteen years abroad, the horse-headed woman and possession imagery, the fragility of the kraft paper support, the Oshun / Elegua / Ogun reading of The Eternal Present, and Lam's quotation about relocating Black cultural objects in their own landscape.
• The Pluralism Project, Harvard University, "Santeria: La Regla de Ocha-Ifa and Lukumi": the 500,000 to 700,000 Africans brought to Cuba, the diversity of their origins, the orisha and Catholic saint pairings (Changó and St. Barbara, Ogún and St. George, Babalú Ayé and St. Lazarus), and the contested status of the term Santería.
• The Museum of Modern Art, "Wifredo Lam: When I Don't Sleep, I Dream," exhibition page: dates of November 10, 2025 to April 11, 2026, its status as the first United States retrospective covering the full trajectory of Lam's work, and his description of his art as an "act of decolonization."
• The Morgan Library and Museum, Aimé Césaire, "Retorno al país natal," printed books record: Lydia Cabrera as translator, Wifredo Lam as illustrator, Benjamin Péret's preface, and publication in Havana by Molina y Cía in a limited edition of 300 copies.
• Paula Sato, "Wifredo Lam, the Shango Priestess, and the Femme Cheval," Journal of International Women's Studies, vol. 17, no. 3 (2016), Bridgewater State University: Mantonica Wilson's role as a priestess of Changó and the femme cheval as an image of orisha possession, in which the devotee is described as being ridden by the spirit.

Written by Robert Lawrence, painter and founder of Noirci Studio. Raised in Atlanta and trained at Clark Atlanta University, he has painted Black life from memory since 2006. He founded Noirci Studio, establishes its curatorial standards, and continues to make art. Every article is reviewed under our editorial guidelines.