Name: Artist Talk: Living in Brilliant Suspension with Didier William
Start: 2025-11-13T18:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-11-13T19:00:00-05:00
Location: ArtYard

Artist Talk: Living in Brilliant Suspension with Didier William

Join us to celebrate the opening of Living in Brilliant Suspension with an artist talk featuring Didier William
About this Event

Please join us for a walk-through and a conversation between artist Didier William, Associate Professor of African American and Black Diasporic Art Anna Arabindan-Kesson, and Curator and Associate Professor of Black Studies Jerry Philogene as they discuss the current exhibition, Living in Brilliant Suspension: Didier William.

Living in Brilliant Suspension is a solo exhibition featuring works by multimedia artist Didier William. The exhibition features more than 20 works exploring the relationship between the body, ground, and land, offering poetic reflections on the contemporary narratives of living and ancestral memories of belonging. The new works are influenced by the flora and fauna produced in the wetlands and swamps of the Atchafalaya Basin in northwest Louisiana, allegorically connecting people to water, history, and the sedimentation created in the wetlands by movement and time. Continuing with his signature imagery of bodies ungrounded and navigating atemporal geographies that expound on the immigrant experience and the kinetic life of displaced people, these paintings, drawings, and sculptural figures offer vibrant and brilliant texture and materiality for capturing generational memories.

Anna Arabindan-Kesson is an associate professor of Black Diasporic art with a joint appointment in the Departments of African American Studies and Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. She practiced as a Registered Nurse before completing her PhD in African American Studies and Art History at Yale University. Anna's writing and teaching focus on Black Diaspora art, along with the intersection of art, empire, migration, and medicine in Indian and Pacific Ocean communities. She sits on the advisory board of 12 Gates Arts in Philadelphia, on the Board of Directors of the American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia, and directs Art Hx, a research hub that connects art, the afterlives of colonial medicine and storytelling.