Join 2020—21 artist in residence Widline Cadet for a multi-generational and multi-disciplinary roundtable conversation with artists Didier William, Madjeen Isaac, and Abigail Lucien. With practices that span photography, painting, printmaking, sculpture, and time-based media, the artists connect as kinfolk of the Haitian diaspora. The discussion will include topics such as home, family, (be)longing, nostalgia, memory, legibility, identity, (im)migration, and place. 

This program will be streamed on Zoom and will feature live CART captioning and ASL interpretation. 

Widline Cadet in Conversation is presented on the occasion of (Never) As I Was: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2020–21, held at MoMA PS1 while the Studio Museum constructs a new building on the site of its longtime home on West 125th Street. 

The Studio Museum in Harlem’s Artist-in-Residence program is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts; Joy of Giving Something; Robert Lehman Foundation; New York State Council on the Arts; Doris Duke Charitable Foundation; Jerome Foundation; Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation; and by endowments established by the Andrea Frank Foundation; the Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Trust; and Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

Digital programming is made possible thanks to support provided by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation’s Frankenthaler Digital Initiative.

Additional support is generously provided by The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

Widline Cadet Event Participant Bios

Participant Bios

Widline Cadet is a visual artist born in Pétion-Ville, Ayiti and currently based in the United States. Her multi-disciplinary practice combines photography, video, performance, sound, sculpture, and installations to create a visual language uniquely her own. Her work incorporates public and personal history as source material to explore Haitian cultural identity, Black (im)migration to the United States, intergenerational memory, Black feminine interiority, and hyper-visibility in relation to notions of selfhood.

Didier William is originally from Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He earned an BFA in painting from The Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University School of Art. His work has been exhibited at the Bronx Museum of Art, The Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, The Museum at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, The Carnegie Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and The Figge Museum Art Museum. He is represented by James Fuentes Gallery in New York and M+B Gallery in Los Angeles. William was an artist-in-residence at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation in Brooklyn, NY, a 2018 recipient of the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 2020 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grants and a 2021 recipient of a Pew Fellowship from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. He has taught at several institutions including Yale School of Art, Vassar College, Columbia University, UPenn, and SUNY Purchase. He is currently Assistant Professor of Expanded Print at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. 

Madjeen Isaac (b. 1996) based in Brooklyn, NY has rooted her practice in her Haitian-American identity and Afro-Diasporic stories. She explores themes of nostalgia and familiarity by reconstructing and assembling mélanges of urban and tropical environments to create utopias and realms of her imagination. Growing up in a predominantly Caribbean neighborhood and being a first generation American influences Isaac’s process of commemorating memories and cultures that have shaped her upbringing. Ultimately, her work centers narratives of liberation, leisure, and transformative futures. Isaac received a BFA from Fashion Institute of Technology (2018) and an MA in Art+Edu & Community Practice at New York University (2021). 

Abigail Lucien (b. 1992) is a Haitian-American artist working in sculpture, time-based media, and language. Their practice looks at ways cultural identities and inherited colonial structures transmit to the body and psyche by challenging systems of assimilation through material. Lucien was named to the 2021 Forbes 30 Under 30 list, is a recipient of a 2021 VMFA Fellowship and a 2020 Harpo Emerging Artist Fellow. Their work has exhibited at museums and institutions such as SculptureCenter (NY), MoMA PS1 (Long Island City, NY), Atlanta Contemporary (Atlanta, GA), The Luminary (St. Louis, MO), UICA (Grand Rapids, MI), and The Fabric Workshop and Museum (Philadelphia, PA). Raised in Cap-Haïtien, Haïti and the northeast coast of Florida, Lucien is currently based in Baltimore, MD where they teach sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art. 

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