The following conversation between artist Didier William and Frist Art Museum Senior Curator Katie Delmez took place in the fall of 2024. It has been lightly edited for clarity.


KD: Didier, can you please briefly introduce yourselves and your practice?

DW: I am Didier William. I was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and when I was six years old, our family moved to Miami, Florida. And at that point, I started the process of trying to get to know the place that we left behind. I don’t think little me knew that that’s what was happening, but now looking back on that period of time, the fifteen, sixteen years I spent in Miami, growing up in Miami, it was very much about trying to unpack the spaces, the people, the life my family had to leave behind by circumstance. And that curiosity has continued to grow into a painting and printmaking practice that tries to image the desires and the appetite of that young boy who was trying to figure out where he’s from and who these people are that populate his dreams and his fantasies.


KD: In Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage, we focused on how collage was a part of your creation process. This exhibition is looking at how your Haitian American identity informs the work. What are some of the primary ways in which we can see that influence?

DW: I think that comes out most apparently in the symbols, icons, and structures that I choose to work with. The work in this exhibition with [M. Florine Démosthène] is specifically work that is bringing back the sensibility of ground into the paintings. For a long time, my paintings insistently and intentionally refused a kind of groundedness as a sort of imperative or condition of immigrant life and, you know, the life of someone who’s not native to this country. Most recently—and I think a lot of the work in this show is included in that—most recently, I’ve started thinking about what are the grounds and spaces that are in fact relevant to the narratives that I want to work with. And that means looking at ground and geography based here in the United States. That means looking at terrain, and edge, and landscapes, and geography, for lack of a better word, that is specific to the US, even though the narratives themselves are pointing to this kind of non-ancestral relationship to that very ground.


KD: What are some of the commonalities that you see between your work and M. Florine Démosthène’s, and where do you see departures?

DW: I think something a lot of—and I’ve been thinking about this recently—a lot of the artists, particularly Haitian artists, whose work I’m excited about and fond of all seemed to have this sort of impulse to describe personhood and bodies is nonsingular ways. And I’m thinking about Florine’s work, I’m thinking about Widline Cadet’s work, I’m thinking about Nyugen Smith’s work. I’m thinking about a number of different, particularly Haitian, artists who, when they sort of set out to elucidate a narrative for the viewer, the way that the body is constructed is always in multiple. It’s always sort of consciousness that is split apart into multiple bodies and multiple containers of personhood. And I think that’s the first thing that sort of struck me about Florine’s work that I felt like I could really relate to. And I think it speaks to this way in which, when you are someone who is navigating the conditions of immigration, either directly for yourself or it’s been part of your family history and your family story, that necessarily splits consciousness and splits identity in various ways that you then have to cobble back together in some fashion. You then have to sort of sift through this kinetic system of cultural and maybe even racial and ethnic identity to find the sort of nucleus or source that allows you to maintain a sense of self. I think that’s something that is perhaps a universal quality that a lot of us can relate to, but I think it is a consistent strain of continuity in a lot of Caribbean art.


KD: Do you see your work as being part of the conversation to present a more accurate and complete narrative about Haitians living in the and working in the US?

DW: It’s a good question. I mean, well—two parts. First part: I was actually having a conversation with another friend about this very thing. And she’s also a Haitian scholar, writer, art historian, and she was saying that she does not—and she’s been in United States longer than I have—she does not consider herself an immigrant. She’s been here long enough and has acculturated to the United States to such an extensive degree that the term immigrant doesn’t really feel identifiable. And I love that term. That is precisely who and what I am, and I wear it proudly. I don’t use the term migrant necessarily, but I am an immigrant to the United States. My Blackness to the US is an adopted one, and my Blackness to Haiti is an ancestral one. And that is a critical and important difference that I think I always love to highlight and is so determinantal of itself. It’s something that I think is—there’s power in it, there’s agency in it. I think the West—if we sort of frame it from a sort of Western, stationary, native context, then it gets embedded into a sort of trauma narrative: “These poor Black folks who can’t pull themselves together, and can’t get their country together, and need to find refuge in other places.” That’s one sort of Western racist framing that gets embedded in that term, right? But it ignores two hundred years of history of the United States, France, and Canada abusing, destroying, and pillaging Haiti and punishing Haiti for what happened in 1804. And so, when I wear that label, I wear it proudly to really situate the sociopolitical condition that has necessitated me becoming an immigrant in the first place. So, I don’t balk at that term whatsoever, and the first line in my bio is “born in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti.”

And then secondly: I don’t know that my work speaks directly to what’s happening in Springfield and this sort of contemporary dialogue around how Haitians are perceived, with the exception of a few paintings. And if we do in fact include Resurrection, Redemption, I think that painting does speak directly to what’s happening in Springfield. That painting is about the early ’90s, when my brothers and I were brand new to this country, and we were subject to all kinds of vile, racist calls and harassments that were normal—were normalized, I should say—in terms of how people treat Haitian immigrants, particularly in places like Miami, which has the largest Haitian population outside of Haiti—a place where in fact we probably should have felt safe, and we didn’t feel that that way at all. We were afraid to go to school. My parents were anxious about going to work. But we had no choice. We had no choice but to build coping mechanisms for that kind of racist assault. And so, I always think of my work as trying to fill the sort of historical gaps—intentional historical gaps—that have been left out of the Haitian narratives—the desires, the joys, the flamboyance. The archive of Haitian history has been intentionally left with omissions dating all the way back to 1804. Toussaint Louverture kept copious notes and copious handbooks, and they were all burned and destroyed immediately upon his arrest by the French. And so, right from the very beginning, the West had an interest in and an imperative in erasing Haitian history and in eradicating the possibility of the first free nation of formerly enslaved Black people. That has been—that image, that vision—Michel-Rolph Trouillottaught us that the very reason why the Haitian revolution was so successful is because it was unimaginable. It was unimaginable that this population of stolen West Africans could rid themselves of the toxicity of slavery, and the West has tried to make sure that that imaginative possibility remains eradicated, remains in the background, for as long as Haiti’s history—so much so that it’s almost a mantra to always follow Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Western news media never leaves that phrase outside of Haiti’s name. It’s always Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. And so, I think myself and a lot of Haitian makers, and artists, and sculptures, and cultural workers have tried to correct the narrative around Haiti’s history as much as possible.


KD: So lastly, how do you see your experience as an immigrant or first-generation American intersecting with that of immigrants from other parts of the world?

DW: I think cis-hetero white supremacy is killing all of us, whether we’re aware of it or not. I think Black people are just in the position of having to be hyperaware of it at every moment of the day, but it’s killing all of us. And I think when artists are describing these conditions and reaffirming our humanity and our personhood through narrative, stories, anecdotes, iconography, really that’s just about our lived realities. A lot of those cross cultural barriers, they cross nationalistic barriers. In many ways I’m just talking about the complexities of my family trying to survive, right—my mom and dad trying to raise three kids in the safest, most comfortable place possible and all of the different sort of occurrences and things that happen in that process, which I’m sure every parent can relate to. Now, me having my own kids, I certainly look back on that and I’m like, “Oh, this is what they were going through.” And I’m sure other parents coming to see the exhibition when I’m talking about these things will—even if they’re not Haitian—will think, “Oh my God, I remember feeling the same way when my kids were small,” or whatever. And so, to that extent, I think—I don’t think that there’s anything specifically unique about what I’m talking about. The sociopolitical conditions are what make it unique, the omissions are what make it unique, the particular systemic barriers are what make it unique, the particular coping strategies that have we’ve had to build and that then turn into these kind of cultural characteristics, those are what make it unique. But I think everything else I’m talking about is pretty universal.

I think it’s one of the reasons why I build many different layers of legibility into the paintings. So, if someone doesn’t understand or doesn’t know Haitian history and doesn’t know art history, if they’re willing to be present with the artwork, and they’re willing to read material, and they’re willing to look closely, I think they’ll still understand the work. For me, it’s never a miss when a viewer doesn’t understand—or finds a different form of legibility, I should say, for the paintings. I love that. One thing I used to always say is, “I want my mom, an art historian, a Haitian cultural critic, and a master printer, to look at my paintings and to have four different ways of reading the same painting.” And for me, that’s a joy. That’s not a problem. That’s massively rewarding.

DONATE. GIVE. SUPPORT.
Please consider supporting the Frist Art Museum with a donation. Your gift is essential to our mission of serving the community through the arts and art access in particular. We truly appreciate your generosity.