(Never) As I Was

(Never) As I Was features new work by the 2020–21 artist in residence of The Studio Museum in Harlem: Widline Cadet (b. 1992, Pétion-Ville, Haiti), Texas Isaiah (b. Brooklyn, NY), Genesis Jerez (b. 1993, Bronx, NY), and Jacolby Satterwhite (b. 1986, Columbia, South Carolina).

Widline Cadet’s photo and video work examines intergenerational memory, selfhood, and erasure within the diasporic experience. Curator Legacy Russel writes that "[h]er work establishes an entirely new landscape of, and mapping between, the United States (now the artist’s home) and of a Haiti that Cadet experiences through the life and language of her family stories, those that perhaps she will never know fully despite her reach toward them".
Texas Isaiah offers a space for mourning, celebration, prayer, and remembrance, asserting the significance of imagination in the abolition of gender while exploring the healing capacity of rest as a place of connection.
Genesis Jerez’s collaged paintings layer family photographs, oil paint, and charcoal to create works that interrogate her own personal histories and reckon with questions of diasporic fracture.
Jacolby Satterwhite’s multidimensional installation sees the artist’s return to painting, engaging fantasy and surrealism as a coping mechanism for healing and flaying open an existential psychic space for imagining transcendent futures.
With communication deeply mediated by the digital, each artist took on the challenge of recharting the territories of domestic, social, and studio space. The outcomes are tender and lyrical explorations of family histories, memoir, spirituality, and memory. In reflecting on their private pasts, these artists have created works that look toward what collectively lies ahead, to a world that is at once achingly the same and never as it was.

This exhibition marks the third year of the multiyear partnership between The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Museum of Modern Art, and MoMA PS1.
MoMA PS1
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For general inquiries, please contact +1 (718) 784-2084 or visit moma.org/ps1.
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