Image: Milwaukee Art Museum
Milwaukee Art Museum is presenting ‘Currents 40: Widline Cadet’ at the Herzfeld Center for Photography and Media Arts through August 9, 2026. The exhibition is described by the museum as Widline Cadet’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States and the full presentation of her nearly decade-long project ‘Seremoni Disparisyon’ (‘Ritual [Dis]Appearance’). It opened May 8 and is included with admission.
According to the museum, the show brings together Cadet’s photography, video, family snapshots, and installation to explore Black diasporic life through her own experience of emigrating to the United States. The exhibition frames Cadet’s practice as one that pushes the boundaries of contemporary image-making while remaining rooted in personal and familial memory. The museum positions the presentation within its ‘Currents’ series, which it calls a platform for new ideas in contemporary art.
Cadet began by photographing her extended family in response to a scarcity of ancestral images and the physical distance from her home country. As access to family in Haiti became increasingly limited, she turned the camera toward herself and those around her, building what the museum describes as a living archive. Across the exhibition, her works address migration, memory, and belonging through staging, autobiographical detail, and visual strategies such as doubling and repetition.
The museum says the works are displayed in unexpected and spatially dynamic ways, shifting them away from traditional modes of photographic presentation. That installation approach is meant to invite viewers to encounter the images not only as documents, but as open-ended narratives that move between absence and presence, and between past and present. The exhibition builds on Milwaukee Art Museum’s long-standing commitment to photography, video, and installation.
The artist, Widline Cadet, was born in 1992 in Pétion-Ville, Ayiti, and earned her MFA from Syracuse University after completing a BA in studio art at the City College of New York. The museum notes that her work has been widely exhibited and published and is held in collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Huis Marseille, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and Milwaukee Art Museum.
The exhibition includes selected works such as ‘Si ou ta dwe bliye wout lakay ou (lè tout limyè yo etenn)’ (‘Should You Forget Your Way Home (When All the Lights Go Off)’), ‘Manyen distans’ (‘Touching Distance’), ‘Yon etranje ki pa sanble youn #2’ (‘A Stranger Who Doesn’t Look Like One #2’), ‘Sé sou ou mwen mété espwa m #3’ (‘I Put All My Hopes on You #3’), ‘Jiskaske enkinite vini nan yon fen’ (‘Until Infinity Comes to an End’), and ‘Nou fè pati, nou se, nou anvi’ (‘We Belong, We Be, We Long’). The museum also lists ‘Seremoni Disparisyon #1’ (‘Ritual [Dis]Appearance #1’) among the works on view.
Cadet’s first monograph, ‘Ritual [Dis]Appearance / Seremoni Disparisyon,’ was published by Black Mountains Studio in May 2025. Milwaukee Art Museum says the exhibition is sponsored by the Herzfeld Foundation and presented in the Herzfeld Center for Photography and Media Arts.
