Title: Widline Cadet: Ritual [Dis]Appearance

We all strive to determine our place in the world, building a personal story grounded in memory. But what if a rupture occurs — memories are scattered, family ties are strained, and histories forgotten. Widline Cadet has accepted the introspective challenge to reconstruct her personal history as a Haitian immigrant with both exuberance and authority. Her first solo museum exhibition in the United States, Currents 40: Widline Cadet, is on view in the Herzfeld Center for Photography and Media Arts at the Milwaukee Art Museum through August 9.

The exhibition is curated by Kristen Gaylord, Herzfeld Curator of Photography and Media Arts, who collaborated with the artist to transform the galleries into a floating landscape — Cadet’s personal vision of her family’s migration story. The exhibition presents 52 photographs and videos, as well as installations that include ceramic objects and images from her personal family archive, “objects that could travel across distance and time.”

Widline Cadet is a visual artist born in Pétion-Ville, Ayiti and currently based in the United States. Her practice is rooted in photography and includes video, sound, sculpture, performance, and installation. Her work centers her family’s lived experience of immigrating from Haiti to the United States as source material to explore the complexities of Black diasporic life and survival.

Cadet earned her BA in studio art from the City College of New York and an MFA from Syracuse University. She a recipient of a 2013 Mortimer-Hays Brandeis Traveling Fellowship, a 2018 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture artist in resident, a 2019 Lighthouse Works fellow, a 2019 Syracuse University VPA Turner artist in resident, a 2020 Lit List finalist, the 2020 Museum of Contemporary Photography’s Snider Prize winner, a recipient of a 2020 NYFA / JGS Fellowship in photography, a 2020-21 artist in residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem, and a 2021-2022 visual arts fellow at The Fine Arts Work Center. Her work has been featured in Aperture Magazine, FOAM, The New Yorker, TIME Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Financial Times, Wallpaper* among others. Cadet has exhibited in the U.S. and internationally. Her work is held in various public and private collections including, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Contemporary Photography, The Huis Marseille, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), The Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), The Milwaukee Art Museum, and The Princeton University Art Museum.