A bold blend of influences define Wifredo Lam’s work

Bottom line: Three mix-master creatives, including seminal Latin-American artist Wifredo Lam, testify to the complexity of influences and identity in art-making.

The crowd milling around the Wieland Pavilion for the retrospective “Wifredo Lam: Imagining New Worlds” says something about this show: hang it and they will come. They being a remarkably diverse, multicultural mix of viewers young and old who attest to the power of delivering the unexpected at a museum that has increasingly been taking more programming chances.

This retrospective of a fascinating 20th century Cuban artist offers a satisfying look at Lam’s rich, polyglot life. Through some 40 works including paintings, prints and drawings, “Imagining New Worlds” delivers an artistic sensibility in perpetual, captivating flux. Lam’s story is told from early realist portraiture and landscapes in the 1920s and early 1930s to the artist’s increasingly fantastic vision as he fell under the sway of European Surrealism in the 1940s and then delved into his own Afro-Cuban origins.

A compelling figure on many levels, Lam rubbed elbows with some of Modernism’s superstars, including André Breton, Pablo Picasso, writer Gabriel García Márquez and anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. As if following the incubation of each new global movement, Lam hopped from his native Cuba to Paris, to Spain and Haiti and Havana all the while soaking in the visual influences percolating around him. From Cubism to Surrealism to the Afro-centric philosophy of the Négritude movement with its rejection of colonialism and emphasis on black identity, he delved into African art, Santeria and voodoo along the way. Those myriad visual and philosophical seductions, that defined what curator Elizabeth T. Goizueta calls Lam’s “hybrid style” play out in thrilling ways. Images like the mesmerizing “Grand Capricorne” (1944) blend the familiar ameboid curves and primitivism of Cubism, but married with the mischievous, cartoony visage of the African deity Eleggua who increasingly peeps out of many of Lam’s paintings. In the winsome, fanciful “Le Sombre Malembo, Dieu du carrefour” (1943) Lam paints a gloriously verdant array of greens and foliage forms inspired by Cuba’s lush landscape from which those beguiling, mystical figures emerge.

Enlarging the scope of Lam’s contributions are New York-based artist José Parlá and Atlanta artist Fahamu Pecou, who offer contemporary responses to Lam’s work in two related exhibitions. Parlá creates hulking, iceberg-like sculptural paintings that look like huge chunks of walls transported to the museum and convey the layered palimpsest of urban spaces from Savannah to Puerto Rico.

Fahamu Pecou’s contribution to “Imagining New Worlds” shows an artist of incredible imagination and adaptability whose unique body of work both reacts to Lam’s work, while enlarging his own. In one large room Pecou has created a suite of paintings in rich colors that blend contemporary hip hop and touchstones of African culture. The work is a moving, celestial, time-tripping homage from a young artist testifying to all that has come before him.

In a perfect encapsulation of Lam-style hybridity, Pecou allows museum-goers to create their own mixes at a DJ sound station where contemporary hip hop, poetry from Négritude founder Aimé Césaire and the Surrealists and drum beats blend in a seductive illustration of the power of historical collage. Like Lam, Pecou shows not only the stew pot of influences that can define an artist’s work but also how fluid, changing and complex identity can be.