Widline Cadet

Widline Cadet often blends archival family photographs with staged portraits, placing them within shaped frames that function as both windows and portals—views into a life or passages into an imagined elsewhere. In Shifting Skies (2025), groupings of half-moon frames adapt the decorative designs of breeze blocks, cement bricks used to construct walls that can offer privacy while allowing a view, which Cadet associates with her childhood in Haiti. The spiraling arrangements suggest pinwheels, flowers, or compass roses—symbols of play, beauty, and migration. Within these frames Cadet has cropped and isolated details from family photographs: a domestic table arrangement, a glimpse outside a curtained window. In doing so, she has constructed an archive—one shaped by memory, longing, and loss as much as by historical record. Just as important as what is shown is what is missing: the voids left by displacement and the unrecorded histories of migration. These images then become linked by associations, gestures, memories, and feelings, coalescing into an archive that preserves what history has overlooked and envisions what the future might remember.

Widline Cadet was born in 1992 in Pétion-Ville, Haiti. Through a practice rooted in photography, Cadet draws inspiration from her experience immigrating from Haiti to the United States to broadly address the complexities of Black diasporic life. Solo exhibitions include the Milwaukee Art Museum (2026); Nazarian/Curcio, Los Angeles (2025); PHotoESPAÑA, Case de América, Madrid (2024); Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography, Amsterdam (2023); and Deli Gallery, New York (2021). Recent group exhibitions include Pérez Art Museum, Miami (2025, 2024); Liverpool Biennial, England (2025); International Center of Photography, New York (2025); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2024); El Museo del Barrio, New York (2024); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2023); Somerset House, London (2023); Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco (2023); Milwaukee Art Museum (2022); and MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2021). Cadet earned a BA from the City College of New York (2013) and an MFA from Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY (2020).