Join ICI for a multifaceted look inside the collaboration between artist and curator—and how interdisciplinary ways of working can productively challenge the structures of art spaces—through a conversation between artist Didier William and curator Erica Moiah James. The discussion took as its starting point the exhibition Didier William: Nou Kite Tout Sa Dèyè, which James curated and which opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami in December 2022. The show featured forty of William’s paintings and prints, as well as a new sculpture, and was hailed as a standout of Art Basel Miami Week where it was praised for the beauty and intensity of the work along with the intimate exhibition experience it offered to viewers.
In this conversation, William and James embarked on a virtual tour of the exhibition as an opening to a broad-ranging consideration of the challenges and opportunities of curating groundbreaking work in museum spaces. They offered a look inside the development process: the major shifts in thinking that occurred over the course of their collaboration, the many considerations that go into the presentation of a survey of an artist’s work, and the challenges of responding to Florida’s tense political climate with a curatorial and artistic practice that is deeply engaged with histories of art and politics of being. Addressing questions of diaspora, immigration, identity, and belonging in a multi-temporal Caribbean context and through a queer Black lens, Didier William: Nou Kite Tout Sa Dèyè engaged audiences in a context that is deeply personal to William: the North Miami community where his family immigrated from Haiti in 1989.
A version of the video with ASL intepretation is available here.
