Genevieve Gaignard’s new exhibit ‘This is America’ on view at Atlanta Contemporary

Posted in Articles, Arts, Audio, Interviews, Media Archive, United States on 2022-03-17 19:49Z by Steven

Genevieve Gaignard’s new exhibit ‘This is America’ on view at Atlanta Contemporary

WABE (WABE 90.1 FM, WABE TV)
Atlanta, Georgia
2022-02-10

Adron McCann

Genevieve Gaignard’s print “I Wear A Thousand Faces, All To Hide My Own, 2018.” (Image courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Gallery Los Angeles)

In 2018, Donald Glover, a.k.a. Childish Gambino, released the viral hit song “This is America,” a razor-sharp commentary on contemporary society. In a nod to his incisive work, artist Genevieve Gaignard presents a new exhibition, “This is America: The Unsettling Contradictions in American Identity,” at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center from Feb. 12 – May 15. It’s the first solo exhibition of the multidisciplinary artist’s photography and installation work, through which she unravels the ongoing issues complicating the identities and representations of Americans. Gaignard joined “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes via Zoom and curator Karen Comer Lowe to talk about the artist’s new contributions to Atlanta Contemporary.

How race informs the artwork of Gaignard, who is biracial:

“Once you look at it, I think it’s everything. I’m really interested in owning both sides of my story, and so I don’t really tiptoe around those things,” said Gaignard…

Read the entire article here.

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Being biracial and, more recently, bicoastal (having been away from her L.A. home during the residency), there’s a sense of a constant effort of recentering and reworking through a whole host of feelings that’s relatable for many people, especially during this time of reckoning with the state of race, health, and politics in our country.

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2021-09-23 02:17Z by Steven

Looking at [Genevieve] Gaignard’s work, you can see what she might be trying to work through—feelings of home, identity, family, and belonging. Being biracial and, more recently, bicoastal (having been away from her L.A. home during the residency), there’s a sense of a constant effort of recentering and reworking through a whole host of feelings that’s relatable for many people, especially during this time of reckoning with the state of race, health, and politics in our country. “Sometimes I think, ‘How many feelings can you hold on to?’” she said. “I can put this particular feeling here or this mood can live here,” she added, nodding to the way her works become vessels for her emotions and concerns.

Dominique Clayton, “Genevieve Gaignard’s Timely Work Documents Racial Injustice and Calls for Change,” Artsy, October 13, 2020. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-genevieve-gaignards-timely-work-documents-racial-injustice-calls-change.

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Genevieve Gaignard’s Timely Work Documents Racial Injustice and Calls for Change

Posted in Articles, Arts, History, Media Archive, Social Justice, United States on 2021-09-23 01:36Z by Steven

Genevieve Gaignard’s Timely Work Documents Racial Injustice and Calls for Change

Artsy
2020-10-13

Dominique Clayton


Genevieve Gaignard, ​Trailblazer (A Dream Deferred)​, 2017. ©Genevieve Gaignard. Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles.

In a period when many are glued to their devices, waiting for the latest updates on the upcoming election or ongoing pandemic, it’s hard for creatives to focus on new projects and work. Yet for artists like Genevieve Gaignard, who retreated to an artist residency shortly after the onset of the pandemic, this time has served as the catalyst for continuing to create groundbreaking work that speaks to our past, present, and future.

Gaignard recently returned to Los Angeles, where she is based, after spending roughly five months at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams, Massachusetts. There, she completed the inaugural Artist’s Laboratory residency program and opened a new exhibition at MCLA Gallery 51, titled “A Long Way From Home.” Both initiatives are led by the director of the Berkshire Cultural Resource Center Erica Wall, a Black gallerist and curator who previously ran her own space in Santa Ana, California. “Genevieve is such a deep and amazingly prolific artist, whose work reflects her laser focus and commitment to documenting and illuminating racial injustice in the U.S. over time, in real time,” Wall said. “Social media can hardly keep up with her!”

While the effects of COVID-19 caused all of the programming around the residency and the exhibition to move online, Gaignard and Wall made virtual magic happen by pivoting to a series of workshops, sessions, and a lovely exhibition opening via Zoom. There, alongside other artists and supporters, I witnessed the big reveal of Gaignard’s latest work, which brought on a combination of laughter and tears…

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#ArtistatCB: Genevieve Gaignard on “Black is Beautiful”

Posted in Articles, Arts, Autobiography, Media Archive, Passing, United States, Videos on 2019-09-04 22:53Z by Steven

#ArtistatCB: Genevieve Gaignard on “Black is Beautiful”

Crystal Bridges Museum of Art
Bentonville, Arkansas
2019-03-13

Genevieve Gaignard

“I photograph myself to talk about how we navigate through the world and how others see us.”

Genevieve Gaignard is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work focuses on photographic self-portraiture, sculpture, and installation to explore race, femininity, class, and their various intersections. The daughter of a black father and white mother, Gaignard’s youth was marked by a strong sense of invisibility. Was her family white enough to be white? Black enough to be black? Gaignard interrogates notions of “passing” in an effort to address these questions…

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Black, White and Red All Over: Genevieve Gaignard

Posted in Articles, Arts, Interviews, Media Archive, United States on 2019-06-02 00:39Z by Steven

Black, White and Red All Over: Genevieve Gaignard

Musée: Vanguard of Photography Culture
2019-04-24

Ashley Yu

Genevieve Gaignard This American Beauty , 2019. Vintage magazine cutouts, clear acrylic, on panel, 48 x 36 x 2.5 in. (121.9 x 91.4 x 6.3 cm). Courtesy the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.
Genevieve Gaignard
This American Beauty, 2019. Vintage magazine cutouts, clear acrylic, on panel, 48 x 36 x 2.5 in. (121.9 x 91.4 x 6.3 cm). Courtesy the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.

Genevieve Gaignard’s first solo show “Black White and Red All Over” is currently exhibited at the Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago from April 5th-May 24th. The exhibition showcases Gaignard’s new body of mixed media artwork and a new site-specific installation. In this exhibition, the artist speaks on the intersecting representational issues of race, femininity and class in modern American society.

Ashley Yu: Why do you use photo collages of magazine cutouts as your medium of choice?

Genevieve Gaignard: I wouldn’t say this is my medium of choice per se. It’s more that I’m an artist that works in various mediums (photography, installation, sculpture and collage) in order to address the topics of gender, class and racial injustice in America. For me, it’s very instinctual to work with magazine images. I grew up collaging my bedroom walls as a teenager. I feel like, in a way, I’m taking from that memory and applying it to my practice…

Ashley: You often refer to the “invisibility” of growing up mixed-race in America. Would you explain that to us?

Genevieve: Sure. My particular experience growing up in a predominately white town and looking white to most people felt like I wasn’t really seen at all…

Read the entire interview here.

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Q&A | Genevieve Gaignard

Posted in Articles, Arts, Interviews, Media Archive, United States on 2019-05-15 21:10Z by Steven

Q&A | Genevieve Gaignard

Flaunt
2019-05-02

Morgan Vickery, Contributing Editor

Black Swan
Black Swan

Early this April, Chicago welcomed artist Genevieve Gaignard for a solo exhibition with Monique Meloche gallery. The exhibition entitled “Black White and Red All Over” features Gaignard’s newest body of mixed media works on panel as well as a domestic installation.

The Los Angeles-based artist received an MFA in Photography from Yale University. However, Gaignard’s work spans across several mediums including mixed-media, sculpture, and installations. Her work has been showcased across the nation and has found permanent homes at such places as the Studio Museum in Harlem, the California African American Museum, the FLAG Art Foundation, New York, and the San Jose Museum of Art. Gaignard’s work examines issues of race, class, femininity and their various intersections. As the daughter of an interracial couple, identity has informed a large part of Gaignard’s work, in which she invites the viewer to examine their own assumptions on identity…

…Many of the collage works touch on the topics of beauty and femininity. Each of them were composed with vintage wallpaper and vintage magazine cutouts in many variations. The pieces A Shout Out To My Fan Girls and In Full Bloom depict the many-faces of black beauty, especially as it relates to hair. Gaignard connected these works to her own identity as a biracial woman saying, “These are all pictures from wig advertisements. So, talking about how as black women we are told tame our hair and fit into the norm which is presented to us as white. That’s what you’re supposed to strive for, even for me. My hair is straightened right now, so I totally pass in a different way. I think about this constantly.”…

Read the entire interview here.

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Republican, Fear, Love, Blood: The Many Meanings of Red

Posted in Articles, Arts, Interviews, United States on 2019-05-15 20:07Z by Steven

Republican, Fear, Love, Blood: The Many Meanings of Red

Elephant
2019-04-29


In Full Bloom, 2019. Courtesy the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago

Genevieve Gaignard is invested in examining the cultural divide between being black and white in the US, navigating a place for all the incremental shades that exist in between. Her latest work brings identities, experiences, appearances and materials together in symbolic shades of black, white and red. Words by Charlotte Jansen

When I first saw Genevieve Gaignard‘s work, staged photographs she shot of herself in 2017, fresh out of Yale, I immediately identified. As biracial woman like Gaignard, my experiences growing up, too white within my family, too brown in my majority white school, I could relate to the pain of being projected onto, and never quite fitting in. Yet my experiences are quite different to hers, growing up in the south of the US, half black, half white, with red hair; listening to Billy Stewart and watching John Waters films. Music and drag have been major influences on her work, as well as her sense of family and femininity. America has always been louder, brasher and more confident than the UK when it comes to exploring race, for the good and the bad…

Can you tell me what your own relationship with magazines like Jet and Ebony has been?

I remember we had Jet and Ebony delivered to our house when I was growing up. My mother also held onto a lot of those magazines and had her own archive from years prior. Although I work with other magazines as well, such as Life, Women’s Day and McCall’s, it should be acknowledged that in those magazines, especially from the sixties and earlier, black people were not represented at all! It’s quite shocking to flip through an entire magazine from the forties or fifties and not see a single person of colour. It’s disturbing how white America refused to acknowledge an entire race of people. If black folks were present in all the magazines marketed to “Americans”, then I wouldn’t have had to make a point that I also source cut-outs from Jet and Ebony. My works aim to reflect a more inclusive view because that’s more like real life…

Read the entire interview here.

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Artists on Artists: Genevieve Gaignard on Real Worlds: Brassaï, Arbus, Goldin

Posted in Arts, Media Archive, United States, Videos on 2019-02-25 01:01Z by Steven

Artists on Artists: Genevieve Gaignard on Real Worlds: Brassaï, Arbus, Goldin

MOCA
Museum of Contemporary Art
Los Angeles, California
2019-01-24

Genevieve Gaignard’s work mixes elements of self-portraiture, collage, and sculpture to present nuanced issues surrounding race, beauty, and cultural identity. Gaignard’s staged photographs create a platform for what she calls “persona-play-performances” within these spaces. The performances enacted within her photographic works are a combination of autobiography and allegory. Responding to the photographs on view in Real Worlds: Brassaï, Arbus, Goldin, Gaignard will expand on how these three legendary practitioners have influenced her own photographic work.

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The photographs remind us, repeatedly, that the racial delineations imposed by society are often arbitrary and flimsy, always fraught.

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2018-08-10 02:48Z by Steven

The express ornaments of black culture that appear in some of [Genevieve] Gaignard’s images—braids and Afros, head wraps and African prints—like all surfaces, can be borrowed. The photographs remind us, repeatedly, that the racial delineations imposed by society are often arbitrary and flimsy, always fraught.

Katie Ryder, “An Artist’s Costumed Alter Egos Cross Racial Lines,” The New Yorker, July 17, 2018. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/an-artists-costumed-alter-egos-cross-racial-lines.

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An Artist’s Costumed Alter Egos Cross Racial Lines

Posted in Articles, Arts, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2018-08-10 02:41Z by Steven

An Artist’s Costumed Alter Egos Cross Racial Lines

The New Yorker
2018-07-17

Katie Ryder


“Synchronized,” 2018.Photographs by Genevieve Gaignard / Courtesy Shulamit Nazarian

Counterfeit Currency,” a show of self-portrait photography, installation, and collage by Genevieve Gaignard, at the FLAG Art Foundation, in Chelsea, opens with a large photo of the artist on a Florida beach at dusk. As in each of her pictures, Gaignard portrays a character of her own invention, here with long, blond hair and jet-black roots, outfitted in regional strip-mall kitsch. She is stretching a towel behind her, printed to resemble a huge hundred-dollar bill; concealing her torso is a trompe-l’oeil T-shirt showing a cartoon, bikini-clad body, whose peach-beige skin tone closely resembles that of her own.

Gaignard, a woman of mixed race (her father is black, her mother white), makes photographs that play with the outward signifiers and stereotypes of race, class, and femininity, combining and remixing them into sometimes exaggerated but steadily ambiguous costumes. From character to character, she undergoes significant but not quite Shermanian transformations, with no facial prosthetics and minimal makeup, and with each portrait hinging in part on Gaignard’s ability to cross legible boundaries…

Read the entire article here.

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