Born in 1902, Wilfredo Lam grew up in Sagua La Grande, a small Cuban village. His mother, a former slave, was Congolese; his father was a Chinese immigrant. Their histories shaped Lam. He absorbed his godmother’s world—she was a Santeria priestess, healer, and sorceress—and lived in a home his father filled with Chinese porcelain and calligraphy. In 1923, Lam moved to Madrid to study under Fernando Álvarez de Sotomayor y Zaragoza, Salvador Dalí’s former teacher, and expressed his mixed inheritance in his work while absorbing modern painting. He returned to Cuba 18 years later, and began creating the otherworldly landscapes and hybrid figures that defined his oeuvre. “Art,” Lam believed, was an “act of decolonization.” He died in 1982, at 79, and his powerful paintings are now on view in his first U.S. retrospective. —Elena Clavarino