Lecturer Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims is driven by her passion for the arts.

This evening her lecture will focus on the Cuban avant garde artist, Wifredo Lam (1902 - 1982). Ms Stokes Sims is currently the executive director of the Studio Museum in Harlem and she is the third lecturer in the PartnerRe Art Lecture Series 2005.

She spoke to from her New York home on Tuesday evening about her love for the arts and what Wifredo Lam represented to her.

Her dissertation on ?Wilfredo Lam and the International Avant Garde, 1923-1982? was published by the University of Texas Press, in 2002.

She has also written extensively on modern and contemporary artists, with a special interest in African, Latino, Native and Asian American artists.

Ms Stokes Sims first fell in love with the artist Mr. Lam when she was an undergraduate.

She said: ?I think that it wasn?t so much his work, but him. I came into art history in the 60s and 70s and one simply didn?t learn about black surrealists. One day I was looking through this book of Surrealists and I saw him. ?So, it was very attractive to me and he seemed to make his mark in the mainstream art world in 1940?s New York.

?It was not until I re-entered grad-school that I really pursued him in earnest. His acceptance and his reception of the abstract expressionist group gave me another kind of comprehension.?

Ms Stokes Sims lecture will examine the complex relationship of the Cuban Surrealist artist Wifredo Lam with his native Cuba after 1959.

It will emphasis on the presentation of the Parisian Salon de Mai exhibition, in Havana, which took place in 1967.

This occasion marked the second homecoming for Lam since the 1959 Cuban Revolution and it also marked an important moment in the controversial diplomatic and artistic relations in the world at that time.

Ms Stokes Sims will also speak about the reconstituted Salon de Mayo, which presented the work of an international roster of artists, and was accompanied by numerous encounters and interventions between the Cuban art scene and their European counterparts.

For Mr. Lam, the expedition was a personal triumph, as it emphasised themes of artistic collaboration, and marked the ultimate expression of surrealist ideals about the role of art in society. Mr. Lam?s works are in many important collections of modern art including the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Tate, London.

His works have also been shown at major museums and important galleries in New York, Paris, Dusseldorf, Madrid, the Reina Sofia, Barcelona, at the Fondation Mir?, The Art Institute, Chicago, the Mus? d?Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Carnegie Institute, in Pittsburgh, the Kassel Documenta (1959, 1960, 1965), the Stedelijk Museum, in Amsterdam, the Venice Biennale (1972), the Museo de Arte Moderno (Mexico), the National Museum of Modern Art, in Tokyo, and numerous others.

Since his death, there has been an emerging consensus that was one of the most important artists of the 20th Century.

He studied at the School of Fine Art, in Havana, and then left for Spain, New York and Paris. However, before moving to Paris, he was injured in 1938 during the Spanish Civil War against the Fascists.

With the defeat of the Republicans he left Spain as a refugee, and travelled to Paris with a letter of invitation to Pablo Picasso.

Picasso welcomed him and introduced him into his circle of artists, poets and intellectuals, which included Andre Breton and the other Surrealists.

Mr. Lam was known as a complex artist whose life spanned the critical art movements of this century, he was a master at mixing the primitive with the urbane, which is demonstrated by his incisive drawings.

By encapsulating both terror and beauty in his gifures, he endowed his drawings with powerful psychological tension.

Ms Stokes Sims was the curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and she received an award from the College Art Association?s Committee on Women in the Arts for her outstanding career, her contributions to redefining the canon of modern art, and her seminal work on twentieth-century African, Latino and Asian-American artists.

Ms Sims began working on a paper about Mr. Lam in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but she was never fortunate enough to meet the Cuban/Parisian great.

?I started back to school in 1979 or 1980 and I was doing a paper on him in 1981,? she said. ?I was going all about town and there was a friend of mine, who knew someone named Roberto White, who knew a curator in Madrid who was involved in Mr. Lam?s 80th birthday celebrations. Mr. Lam?s wife came to meet me in New York and I was making plans to meet him in Paris, in May of 1982, but he unfortunately died before I met him. So, I just missed him.?

Over the years, because of her love for the arts and she has been bestowed with many honourary degrees. She received one from Maryland Institute College of Art, in 1988, Moore College of Art and Design, in 1991, Parsons School of Design at the New School University, in 2000, the Atlanta College of Art, in 2002, and the College of New Rochelle and Brown University, in 2003.

Ms Sims was a forerunner in as far as being an African-American studying art history in the 60s and 70s. She attributes this to her parents, her father was an architect and her mother, an avid art collector.

She and her siblings have all carved their careers in the arts, her sister who was a classical ballerina, now designs for Tiffany, in Paris, and her brother is now a building inspector.

?We grew up being taken to museums and the theatre,? she said. ?I liked to draw and I liked art history, so when I got to college I thought I could combine the two. I would be an art history major, get my doctorate, and go and teach.

?But when I was in my last year of college I started taking art out into the schools to educate students. When I went to graduate school I thought, I would continue in education, but through being at the right place at the right time, I entered the Met in education and went into the curators field. And that is basically how it happened.?

At the moment she still faces a continued battle to ensure that art is something, which is enjoyed by all.

?It?s about what art represents as a whole and I try to change the notion of art being for the elite,? she said. ?I have spent so many years making this case ? that art is needed in our daily lives. I?ve spent 30 years making same argument.

?I believe it with real conviction that artists are important, art is important, creativity is important, and it is an essential part of life as we navigate the world. I battle constantly.?

Sims has also had extensive experience teaching art history and museum practice at Queens College, the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

She also has been a lecturer for the Internship Programme at The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Curatorial and Museum Training Internship courses at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; and a visiting critic and lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, the Maryland Institute College of Art, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Hawaii.

She has served nationally and internationally as a juror and guest curator at The Queens Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Pratt Institute, the Caribbean Cultural Center, New York, Cooper Union, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, the California Museum of Afro-American History and Culture, the Maryland Institute College of Art, and the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans and the National Gallery, Kingston Jamaica.

After all of the above, she figures that when she is ready she will return to full-time lecturing.

?At some point I will go back to university and teach, I want to give something back,? she said.

The reception begins at 5.30 p.m. for a 6 p.m. lecture. Tickets are $10 for non-members and $5 for members. They are available at the Bermuda National Gallery reception desk or online at www.boxoffice.bm.