Widline Cadet

b. 1992

Widline Cadet works with photography, video, sculpture, performance art, and installation. Her photographs and video art delve into intergenerational memory, selfhood, and the sense of erasure within the Haitian diaspora. 

Cadet was born in Haiti but came to the U.S. in 2002 at the age of ten and didn’t return until 2013. She now lives and works in Los Angeles and teaches photography at UCLA. She likes shooting her photos and videos in LA because the terrain reminds her of Haiti’s. She speaks English better than Creole her first language. Cadet earned her B.A. in studio art from City College of New York in 2018 and afterwards she received a fellowship to travel back to Haiti to make her first body of work, the photo series “Home Bodies.” She received her M.F.A. from Syracuse University in 2020.

She photographs family members to expand her family’s existing small archive. She doesn’t know much about her family history beyond her grandparents whom she never saw. In addition to photographing family, she photographs friends, and strangers as a reminder of continuity, connection, and rebirth. Her images are memories of her first country as she photographs bougainvillea that grew around the home of her parents in Haiti. She places old photos from her family’s collection alongside newer prints to establish an historical timeline that is more cyclical than linear. She thus becomes an observer and participant in her own history. 

Later, she turned the camera onto herself to refer to her own past, becoming part of a sequence from her ancestors to herself. In one photo she pictured herself in a gingham dress that was modeled after her school uniform. In her “Until Infinity Comes to an End” she is one of three young women in identical pale blue dresses who are in profile, angled  away from the camera and staring out into the distance.

She considers her photographs to embody relatives who have never been photographed. This is her way to have an intergenerational way of knowing and imagining relatives whom she has never met.

She employs architectural design in “An Elusive Echo #1 (Green) and “An Elusive Echo #2( Orange) in prints covered by breezeway block patterns, an architectural privacy fence found in both Haiti and Los Angeles. These fences evoke a sense of longing where someone can see their home but not be able to reach it because the fence acts as a barrier.

She has won various fellowships and prizes including an artist in residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem and a visual arts fellowship at The Fine Arts Work Center. Her work has been featured in various magazines, including The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazines. She recently participated in Frieze LA 2024.

Her work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Perez Art Museum Miami, the Milwaukee Art Museum, ad the Princeton University Art Museum.

More here.