Milwaukee Art Museum will host the first solo show in the U.S. by Haitian artist Widline Cadet.
“Currents 40: Widline Cadet,” on view May 8-Aug. 9, also marks the first full showing Cadet’s almost decade-long “Seremoni Disparisyon (Ritual [Dis]Appearance)” project.
The Los Angeles-based Cadet, the museum notes, “explores Black diasporic life through themes of migration, memory, absence, and belonging” via photographic, video and installation work. “Rooted in lived experience and shaped by displacement between Haiti and the United States, ‘Seremoni Disparisyon’ transforms personal history into a dreamlike, proxy world – one that resists fixed narratives and instead unfolds through repetition, doubling, and carefully staged imagery.”
Cadet started the project – which will be on view in MAM’s Herzfeld Center for Photography and Media Arts – as a means of creating a “living archive” in response to the lack of family photographs passed down from generation to generation. Initially, she photographed members of her own extended family, but then expanded to include images of herself and others.
The photographs are exhibited with video, sculptural elements and found images, in what the museum calls, “unexpected configurations that disrupt traditional modes of photographic viewing. The result is an immersive experience that invites viewers to encounter images not simply as documents, but as evolving sites of memory and meaning.”
"In Seremoni Disparisyon (Ritual [Dis]Appearance), Widline Cadet creates an intimate world centered on Black diasporic life that is grounded in her own experience,” said Kristen Gaylord, Herzfeld Curator of Photography and Media Arts.
“Yet, like all great art, her work reaches beyond the personal to address topics broadly relevant to us all, including community and belonging, the gaps of family histories, and maintaining connection across distance and loss.”
The show builds on a relationship that MAM initiated in 2021 with the purchase of work by Cadet.
"The Milwaukee Art Museum holds one of the world’s outstanding collections of 20th-century Haitian art and it is essential that we also make space for contemporary artists who are shaping how diasporic histories are understood today,” said Kim Sajet, Donna and Donald Baumgartner Director of the Milwaukee Art Museum.
“Widline Cadet’s work brings those histories into the present, offering audiences a living, contemporary perspective that deepens how Haitian art is seen and understood at MAM.”
Programming around the exhibition includes a special ddition Gallery Talk with Cadet on May 8, as well as an artist talk with her on July 16, and other events.
For more on the show and related programming, go to mam.org/exhibitions/widline-cadet.
In other MAM news, the re-installed Bradley Wing of Modern Art opens to the public on March 14.
“Every reinstallation tells a new story,” said Sajet, in a press release. “This one reveals how the Bradley Collection has become inseparable from the identity of the Museum itself, a testament to how one person’s vision can inspire generations and shape a city’s cultural future.”
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press. A fifth collects Urban Spelunking articles about breweries and maltsters.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has been heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
