When MFA chair Didier William took some of his students to the Experimental Printmaking Institute (EPI) at Lafayette College, he wasn’t expecting to find a new collaborator.

But Curlee Holton, the founding director of EPI, had plans for the painter and printmaker.

“He introduced me to Nestor Armando Gil and said he teaches in the sculpture department,” William said. “Then Curlee disappeared for a few minutes and when he came back he said, ‘When are you guys doing something together.’ It was a total plant.”

Two years later, something together has become SWARM., a two-person show aiming to forge individual and collective identities across diasporas, dislocations, and reformations. William and Gil first showed SWARM. at PRIZM art fair in Miami and the exhibition is on display through September 9th at PAFA.

“We kept talking and developing a friendship. That friendship turned into text messages and visits to each others studios, conversations, phone calls, all kinds of stuff,” William said. “We would trade drawings and prints back and forth and that material is actually what ended up producing the show.”

Gil said it was easy for the pair to collaborate and exchange ideas.

“It felt right because there were so many immediate interesting overlaps in what Didier is thinking about and what I’m thinking about,” he said. “Those overlaps, instead of just creating a harmony they made this kind of tension that I think really comes out in the work that resulted.”

William and Gil are Haitian and Cuban, respectively, and said they think similarly about their identities and relationships to the island they’re each from.

William is a painter and printmaker, whose work critiques the historical narratives of colonialism through strategies of mythmaking. Gil’s work examines movement, memory, and loss within diasporic communities in sculpture and performance.

This intensely collaborative process was a first for William. He said collaborations like SWARM. had up until recently been fairly uncommon. But now more artists are working more closely together to get their work out in to the world.

“We had very similar relationship to family, and the way family narratives entered our work,” William said. “There was already a lot there for us to build off of and it just seemed so organic and natural. The collaboration, it felt like it was already there and we just had to meet each other.”

The influence the two artists had on one another can be seen in their work.  

“We worked with Jace Clark, the master printer at EPI and made a bunch of work kind of individually but kind of together,” Gil said. “There are a couple of places in Didier’s work where something that I drew maybe got turned into a print and then collaged into his painting.”

Style and work is unique to each artist but visitors to the exhibit will see the same images touch the work of William and Gil.

oracion (ave Maria) by Gil is made of up of large rubber and steel beads, while Rara by William is a painting. The pair didn’t realize the overlaps in the two pieces until the opening reception for SWARM. in Miami.

“I don’t think either of us realized the extent in to which there would be a really potent relationship between the beads and the heads in my painting,” William said. “As soon as you walked into the venue the first thing you saw were these boulder on the ground and just beyond them you’d see the same kind of form of the black boulders represented in the heads of the figures in my work.”

In the fall SWARM. will be exhibited at Lafayette College.

“It has really been two artists working apart but in very close communication with one another so in the end the work I think has a really interesting conversation,” Gil said.

Join Didier William and Nestor Armando Gil for an artist talk at PAFA on Saturday, August 4th. In conversation with the curators of SWARM., the artists will discuss how their respective practices investigate constructed ideas of history, reflect the heritage of the diasporic communities they call home and draw on a multiplicity of artistic practices.

Register now for William and Gil’s artist talk on August 4th