Born in Port-au-Prince and raised in Miami, Didier William draws on Haitian history, mythology and his personal experiences to explore the legacies of colonialism, resistance and the struggle for agency and identity. William’s powerful mixed media compositions lie halfway between figuration and abstraction. The epic, otherworldly bodies are composed of hundreds of tiny carved eyes that invite a haptic experience— an intimate, shared looking with the viewer that collapses physical and temporal planes.
Didier William (b. 1983, Port-au-Prince, Haiti) earned his BFA in painting from The Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University, School of Art. His work will be on view in an upcoming solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami in 2022. William has also exhibited at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; Bronx Museum of Art, Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA; Figge Art Museum, Davenport, IA; Museum at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; and the Museum of the African Diaspora; San Francisco, CA, among others. His work has received critical recognition from The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Hyperallergic, Harpers Magazine, New York Magazine and Art In America. William was a 2020 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, and has taught at several institutions including Yale School of Art, Vassar College, Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania and SUNY Purchase. He is currently Assistant Professor at Rutgers University. Didier William lives and works in Philadelphia.