MFA Boston returns enslaved artist’s work to his heirs, Wifredo Lam, Ghirlandaio’s Adoration of the Magi

The Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston, US, has agreed to return two works from 1857 by the enslaved 19th-century potter David Drake to his present-day descendants. By the terms of the contract, one vessel will remain on loan to the museum for at least two years. The other—known as the “Poem Jar”—has been purchased back by the museum from the heirs for an undisclosed sum and now comes with “a certificate of ethical ownership”. Ben Luke talks to Ethan Lasser, the MFA’s chair of the art of Americas, about this landmark agreement. At the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the exhibition Wifredo Lam: When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream opens on Monday. Lam, who was of African and Chinese descent, is now widely regarded as a key, and singular, figure in Modernist painting. Connected in his long life to the Surrealists and Pablo Picasso, and to literary greats including Aimé Césaire and Edouard Glissant, his distinctive practice was above all centred on a profound engagement with Black diasporic culture. Ben talks to the two lead curators of the exhibition, Beverly Adams, curator of Latin American Art at MoMA, and the museum’s new director, Christophe Cherix. And this episode’s Work of the Week is the Adoration of the Magi (1488) by Domenico Ghirlandaio. The painting is in the Ospedale degli Innocenti, the first hospital for unwanted or orphaned infants, or foundlings, in Europe, built by the great Renaissance architect, Filippo Brunelleschi. The Innocenti, as it is called, is the subject of a new book, called The Innocents of Florence: The Renaissance Discovery of Childhood, by Joseph Luzzi, and Ben speaks to him about the painting and its significance in the Innocenti’s collection.

Wifredo Lam, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 10 November-11 April 2026.

The Innocents of Florence: The Renaissance Discovery of Childhood, published in hardback by WW Norton, from 11 November in the US, priced $29.99, and from 28 November in the UK, priced £23.

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