The full title of this article by Bryan van Putten (Rotterdam Style) is “Wereldmuseum acquires Roberta Stoddart’s ‘Sleepwalkers’ ahead of surrealism upcoming exhibition.” Wereldmuseum Rotterdam acquired the painting by Jamaican artist Roberta Stoddart for its permanent collection, and it will be one of the key works in Leef Surrealisme, a major exhibition opening on September 17, 2026, and running until August 29, 2027.As van Putten states, although Stoddart is well known across the Caribbean and the Americas, her work has not previously been acquired by a European museum. Here are more details from the article. [Many thanks to Abigail RH and Teresa White for sharing this news on Critical.Caribbean.Art.]
The acquisition gives the Rotterdam museum a major Caribbean work ahead of one of its most ambitious upcoming exhibitions. According to Wereldmuseum, Sleepwalkers will play a central role in a show that approaches surrealism as something far broader than a European art movement.
Instead, Leef Surrealisme presents surrealism as a global mentality and a form of resistance, shaped across different continents, cultures and historical moments. In that setting, Stoddart’s painting fits neatly into the exhibition’s wider argument that surrealism remains a living way of seeing, imagining and challenging power.
Surrealism beyond Europe
Leef Surrealisme will bring together works by dozens of artists, including Julio Gálan, Tetsuya Ishida, Roberta Stoddart, Renée Stout, Yves Tanguy, Co Westerik and Santiago Yahuarcani. The exhibition combines works from the museum’s own collection with international loans, including pieces from Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and contemporary work by Rotterdam artists.
The show will feature surrealist art from several continents, including Mexico, Australia, Jamaica and Indonesia. In doing so, Wereldmuseum is deliberately widening the usual museum view of surrealism and placing the dream of a better world in a more global frame.
Bertha Mason at the centre
The painting is set in a dark, humid Caribbean landscape filled with Spanish moss. Figures from past and present seem to gather in a frozen moment, while humans and animals look directly at the viewer as if caught in headlights, pushing a quiet but urgent question forward.
At the centre of the work is Bertha Mason, the so-called attic character from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). In the novel, Bertha, who comes from Jamaica, is reduced to a colonial stereotype. In Stoddart’s painting, she is given her own story and her own voice.
That places Sleepwalkers in dialogue with postcolonial rereadings such as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which retells the story from Bertha’s perspective. By drawing together those literary and historical strands, the painting asks how colonial structures continue to shape identity, gender and class, and how categories such as perpetrator and victim, black and white, past and present remain entangled. [. . .]
What happens after Rotterdam
After its run in Leef Surrealisme at Wereldmuseum Rotterdam, Sleepwalkers will move to Wereldmuseum Leiden. There, it will take a prominent place in the renewed permanent presentation opening in 2027, focused on global perspectives on the history of art and design.
For Rotterdam, though, the first chapter matters most. This is where the painting will begin its museum life in Europe, and where Leef Surrealisme will test a bigger idea: that surrealism is not a closed chapter from European art history, but an active global force that still resonates now. [. . .]
For more information, see https://rotterdamstyle.com/arts-culture/wereldmuseum-acquires-roberta-stoddarts-sleepwalkers-ahead-of-surrealism-upcoming-exhibition
[Shown above: Roberta Stoddart, “Sleepwalkers” (2009–2017).]
The full title of this article by Bryan van Putten (Rotterdam Style) is “Wereldmuseum acquires Roberta Stoddart’s ‘Sleepwalkers’ ahead of surrealism upcoming exhibition.” Wereldmuseum Rotterdam acquired the painting by Jamaican artist Roberta Stoddart for its permanent collection, and it will be one of the key works in Leef Surrealisme, a major exhibition opening on September 17,