Photographer Widline Cadet has opened her first solo museum exhibition in the United States, titled "Currents 40: Widline Cadet," at the Milwaukee Art Museum. The show, on view through August 9, 2026, features 52 photos and videos that explore her family's migration story from Haiti to the United States. Cadet's installation includes a recreated Haitian living room with plastic flowers, ceramic angels, and a wall-size portrait of her father, blending reality and fantasy to evoke fragmented memories of home.
The exhibition matters because it offers an intimate, personal counterpoint to dominant crisis-driven narratives about migrants and migration in the U.S. Cadet's work, which spans Haiti, New York, Florida, and Los Angeles, uses both documentary and surreal imagery to examine the Black diasporic experience and the fractured sense of home across time and place. Curator Kristen Gaylord notes that Cadet's work addresses urgent questions in an open, inviting way, focusing not just on loss but on what has been built in its place.