Updated: 5 days ago
We are delighted to share that Roberta Stoddart’s Sleepwalkers has been acquired by the Wereldmuseum in the Netherlands, as part of their museum collection and as a key work in their upcoming exhibition, ‘Live the Surreal’ opening September 2026.
For Roberta, this is an important institutional recognition, an acknowledgement of her place in global art history and contemporary conversations and signals a new trajectory for her practice and career. For Caribbean art, it is something more: a work born of the region has entered an international museum collection, where it can be seen by new audiences, preserved, studied, exhibited and encountered by audiences for generations to come.
A museum acquisition is a statement of belief in the significance of a work and in the artist who made it. It places the work within an ongoing history and gives it a life beyond the circumstances of its creation. For Caribbean artists, this matters profoundly. So much of the region’s visual history has existed outside the major institutional collections that shape international art history. To enter one of these collections is to become part of that conversation.
And Sleepwalkers is a particularly compelling work with which to do so.
Living the Surreal
The work’ s presence in this important exhibition invites us to consider the Caribbean not through the familiar visual languages of paradise, or cultural celebration, but through a psychologically complex lens. Its title suggests a state between consciousness and unconsciousness—a condition of moving through the world without entirely seeing it, or perhaps of seeing too much and lapsing into an anaesthetised state for survival. It evokes the strange territory between waking and dreaming, presence and absence, memory and reality.
This is particularly resonant when considered through the lens of postcolonial Caribbean life. The Caribbean carries histories that do not remain in the past. Colonialism, displacement, inherited systems of power, migration, memory and the complicated construction of identity continue to inhabit the present. They surface indirectly—in landscapes, gestures, family histories, architecture, language and collective memory, and the past therefore lives as a constant ghost, a haunting of the psyche and an influence on contemporary social, cultural, and economic structures and practises to this very day.
This is what makes Sleepwalkers so powerful. It embodies an eerie atmosphere, a wedding travel story, a representation of a moment, in which so much of the unresolved lingers. The figures—or presences—within the work appear caught between states of consciousness. Bertha, distorted and maddened by her inability to live authentically in her juxtaposition, Rochester the solid figure requiring her conformity to the patriarchy and unable to contain that which is not European in her. Christophine, Bertha’s wise loyal servant tries to restore Berthas sanity through the practise of obeah, and Maillotte, another servant is convinced the marriage will fail. A preacher looms in the background, the driving force of impossible salvation for all of them and the ever present missionizing force of post coloniality. They all inhabit a world that is recognisable and yet estranged.
The guango tree shelters and encapsulates them, streaming moonlight through the leaves and branches- that fleeting moment illuminating the wedding party in the darkness of this perpetual night. The thick paint of the tree and its branches, layer upon layer, sculptural in its final form, building the textural quality of the painting and manifesting its unrelenting weight of the burdens of this cast of characters. The heaviness of history, the constrictions it holds us in, the pathologies it produces in each generation are all felt more deeply. It is dreamlike, but not benign and there is a historical context of different times but contemporary presence. There is the suggestion of hidden horrors, traumas and madness- the fear of zombification and the loss of the authentic self. Beneath it lies a deep unease: the sensation of moving through a reality shaped by histories that have never been completely laid to rest, and still aren’t, to this day.
From Jamaica to the museum
Roberta Stoddart has throughout her career, developed a visual language that resists simple categorisation. Her work asks us to sit with ambiguity, and Sleepwalkers is not a work that resolves itself.
That makes its inclusion in Live the Surreal particularly apt.
Surrealism has often been understood through European art history, but the Caribbean has its own deeply complicated relationship with the surreal: a region where histories, cultures and belief systems have collided and where the extraordinary can coexist with the everyday. What might appear surreal from the outside can, from within the Caribbean, simply be lived reality.
The acquisition of Sleepwalkers by the Wereldmuseum therefore opens a conversation that extends beyond one artist or one painting. It asks what happens when Caribbean experience enters the museum—not as an exotic subject to be observed, but as a complex intellectual, psychological and cultural territory in its own right, confronting and unresolved. Requiring audiences to confront colonial histories through a Caribbean lens, to reflect and feel something of them.
It’s fitting that a work foundationed in states of conflicted consciousness is entering an international museum collection - it can continue its work to wake us up—to histories, experiences and ways of seeing that those outside the Caribbean region rarely can engage with in a meaningful way.
We are thrilled to see Sleepwalkers take its place at the Wereldmuseum, and look forward to seeing how this haunting and deeply evocative work speaks within Live the Surreal.
Roberta will be at the Wereldmuseum for the opening of ‘Live the Surreal’ and will present a public artist talk on 24th September 2026, moderated by curator Wayne Modest.
