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Genevieve Gaignard
Born	1981 Orange, Massachusetts
Nationality	American
Education	Massachusetts College of Art and Design (2007), Yale University (2013)
Known for	Photography, Videography, Installation
Website	http://www.genevievegaignard.com/home

Genevieve Gaignard, born in Orange, Massachusetts in 1981, is best known for work exploring issues of race, class, and gender. As a self-identified mixed-race woman Gaignard’s work utilizes photography, videography, and installation to explore the overlap of black and white America through staged environments and character performances. She received an AAS in Baking & Pastry Arts from Johnson & Wales University, her BA in photography at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2007, and an MFA at Yale University in 2014. Gaigrard's represented by Shulamit Nazarian gallery in Los Angeles, and her work was exhibited at The Cabin LA in Los Angeles, CA, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY,  The California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA The Foley Gallery, New York, NY, and two residentially-owned gallery exhibitions in Los Angeles, CA. Her work's featured in publications as The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. Gaignard’s photographic series is inspired by Carrie Mae Weems with similarities to Diane Arbus and Cindy Sherman formatted as the 21st-century selfie.

Early life

Born and raised in a Massachusetts mill town to a white mother and black father, Gaignard grew up between black and white cultures. Before enrolling at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Gaignard first enrolled at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island in their baking and pastry program. She became interested in pursuing the arts after one of her professors became her mentor. Her professor created alternative assignments to baking challenging Gaignard differently, he reintroduced old mediums such as collage and opened Gaignard to experimentation with installation pieces. According to Gaignard, she “went through this phase where Abercrombie & Fitch was really cool, I would rip pages out of the catalog and collage my whole wall with half naked guys.” Gaignard began investigating racial dynamics with the use of composed environments and fabricated characters.

Gaignard began photographing her family and neighbors as she transitioned into the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Given the assignment “dealing with flesh,” Gaignard used her mother as a subject for her photographs.

Following her graduation in 2007, she applied to Yale University where she was wait-listed. Her anxiety surrounding her admission status motivated her to experiment with video art, where she created offbeat films. After she was accepted, Gaignard transitioned back to photographic mediums with the added juxtaposition of installation elements. Yale's prominent white student body contrasted the culturally enriched city of New Haven challenging Gaignard to re-establish a balance between her two ethnicities. During her time at Yale, she began incorporating the intensity of race and storytelling in her work, “My expression as a person of color is different than others. I have something to say...The stuff I say now sort of addresses a lot of feelings I had as a child.” It was through her exploration of race and family relations that she began creating personas with elaborate domestic interior pieces.

Work

As an emerging artist, Gaignard first garnered attention and notoriety with her 2016 exhibition Smell the Roses. Smell the Roses was first featured at The California African American museum where her photograph "Extra Value (After Venus)" gained traction for her series. Gaignard's character pressed against a painted American flag on the side of a jail wall holding a McDonald's cup and value fries was later featured in the Los Angeles Times on November 17, 2016.

Gaignard explores the topic of racial “passing” and gender to address the difficulties of being a mixed race woman in American society. While Gaignard’s work is said to be similar to Cindy Sherman and Carrie Mae Weems, she prefers not to be compared to them. Like Weems, Gaignard’s works focuses on black female bodies and their place within society. Gaignard’s digital photographs utilize pop culture references and selfie culture to examine being mixed race and black womanhood. She consistently challenges herself by questioning mass media and how it presents white and black culture by pushing the personifications and contrast in her fictitious, femme characters.

Gaignard blends her digital photography with installations involving characteristics of the ideal family home. She states “When I make an installation, I want it to be somewhere between a Wes Anderson film and Harmony Korine’s Gummo: gross and perfect at the same time but those are also super white references—so, that’s always my challenge.” Her 2016 exhibition, "Smell the Roses" at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, California, is a statement on her mixed heritage and life growing up. By combining stereotypically white and stereotypically black livelihoods together in her installations, she challenges the viewer to immerse themselves in experience and to observe different lifestyles and states of being.

Gaignard exaggerates elements within her personifications poising racial anxieties for viewers through parallel perspectives of her own self-identity. Although racial contrast is important to her characters and her overall work, Gaignard also blurs the lines between representations of black and white women by drawing on current and past pop culture references. By blending representations, stereotypes, and taking inspiration from drag culture, she further challenges beauty standard norms, while also showing others the “invisibility” she faced growing up.

Exhibits

All Group Exhibitions

	Exhibit Name	Venue	Year
1	Yale MFA First-Year Student Exhibition	Yale School of Art: Green Hall Gallery Location: New Haven, Connecticut	2013
2	Yale MFA Second-Year Student Exhibition	Yale School of Art: Green Hall Gallery Location: New Haven, Connecticut	2013
3	13 Artists	Yale School of Art Location: New Haven, Connecticut	2014
4	Deep End Yale MFA Photography Thesis	Yale School of Art: Green Hall Gallery, The FLAG Art Foundation, Diane Rosenstein Gallery	2014
5	Shaq Loves People	Expose Chicago Note: Curated by Shaquille O'Neal Location: Chicago, Illinois	2014
6	The New New	Diane Rosenstein Gallery Location: Los Angeles, California	2014
7	Other Spaces	dc3 Location: Edmonton, Alberta, Canada	2016
8	Summer School	The FLAG Art Foundation Location: New York, New York	2016
9	Industry	dc3 Location: Edmonton, Alberta, Canada	2017
10	Comm | Alt | Shift	Aljira Center for Contemporary Art Location: Newark , New Jersey	2017
11	Face to Face: Los Angeles Collects Portraiture	California African American Museum Location: Los Angeles, California	2017
12	Fictions	Studio Museum Location: Harlem, New York	2017
13	Opening the Trap	Interface Gallery Location: San Francisco, California	2018
14	Forms & Alterations	808 Gallery at Boston University Location: Boston, Massachusetts	2018
15	Fun House	Josh Lilley Gallery Location: London, United Kingdom	2018
16	Talisman in the Age of Difference	Stephen Friedman Gallery Location: London, United Kingdom	2018
17	In This Imperfect Present Moment	Seattle Art Museum	2018
18	People Get Ready	Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University Location: Durham, North Carolina	2018
19	Radically Ordinary: Scenes from Black Life in America Since 1968	Allen Memorial Art Museum Location: Oberlin, Ohio	2018
20	Daegu Biennale	Daegu Location: Daegu, South Korea	2018
21	Personal Space	Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art Location:Bentonville, Arkansas	2018
22	Parallels and Peripheries	ArtCenter Location: Miami, Florida	2018
23	Terres de Femmes	Praz-Delavallade Location: Paris, France	2018

All Solo Exhibitions

	Exhibit Name	Venue	Year
1	A Golden State of Mind	Diane Rosenstein Presents at The Cabin LA Location: Los Angeles, California	2015
2	Us Only	Shulamit Nazarian Location: Los Angeles, California	2015
3	Smell the Roses	California African American Museum Location: Los Angeles, California	2016
4	The Powder Room	Shulamit Nazarian Location: Los Angeles, California	2017
5	In Passing	Houston Center for Photography Location: Houston Texas	2017
6	Grassroots	Prospect 4 Location: New Orleans, Louisiana	2017
7	Hidden Fences	Praz-Delavallade Location: Paris, France	2018
8	Counterfeit Currency	The FLAG Art Foundation Location: New York, New York	2018

Notable Exhibits

Us Only

Us Only, was a floor exhibit held at the Shulamit Nazarian gallery in Los Angeles, California from 12 Nov 2015 through 8 Jan 2016. For this particular installation Gaignard created three new personas to help represent her background, including her mother’s obsession with thrifting. Through this project Gaignard tried to use these three personas to specifically represent various aspects of her own identity as a mixed woman. Gaignard also includes pieces such as a water fountain to represent Jim Crow laws and current racial segregation. Each character is photographed outside in a setting that represents their identity. To pair with the picture Gaignard designed a room to go along with the characters identity.

Smell the Roses

Genevieve Gaignard’s first solo museum exhibition, Smell the Roses, was held at California African American Museum in Exposition Park, Los Angeles, California. The exhibition,  which was primarily an installation- based presentation, was held from 19 Oct 2016 through 19 Feb 2017. One main premise of the exhibit was to showcase the feeling of loss. More specifically, every piece in the installation was meant to represent an event suffered by the American people "such as hurricane Katrina and police brutality." Gaignard continues to make her family and life the main focus of her work. For example in this exhibit she utilizes architectural styles from both New England where she grew up and New Orleans where her father is from. She also incorporates a bedroom scene to represent the death of her niece in a house fire. Gaignard also uses herself in the photographs to portray various facets of race, class, and sexuality.

In Passing

Gaignard's first solo exhibit outside of California, In Passing was held at the Houston Center for Photography in 2017. This particular installation is a collection of Gaignard's work since 2015. It is done in this way to help showcase the evolution of her art and also to demonstrate? the continuing themes of what it means to be a black woman in America. Throughout the various photos Gaignard can be seen presenting as both black and white. She can also be seen presenting three different stereotypes about black woman; "a mammy, a pin-up, or a ghetto girl."^[7] Through this exhibit Giagnard aims to help shed light on the idea of passing and black female representation.

Grassroots

Grassroots took place in New Orleans in 2017. Gaignard's creole roots are very important to her formation of identity and art which is why having an instillation in New Orleans was so important to her. This particular exhibit at Prospect.4 aimed to showcase Gaignard's feelings of invisibility during her childhood. Being mixed caused Gaignard to feel as though she did not exactly fit in anywhere. Through this installation she was able to bring that to life.

Hidden Fences

Gaignard's first  exhibit in Paris, Hidden Fences was held at the Praz-Delavallade from 17 Mar through 28 Apr 2018. This installation focused t on gender and race in the form of displacement. The exhibit includes multiple characters, many of whom are representing 50's housewife duties and/or images.

Counterfeit Currency

Gaignard's most recent exhibit, Counterfeit Currency, was held at the The FLAG Art Foundation in New York, New York from 13 Sep through 22 Sep 2018. The main focus of this exhibit is to explore the differences between the ways we see ourselves and others see us. Gaignard always makes a point to involve the concepts of race and identity in her work. The focal art piece of the exhibit,  Seeing is Believing, is a powerful piece representing the idea of self-image. A black mirror was positioned on a white wall on which were depicted  faces of Victorian women, thereby forcing the viewer to see themselves with the judgment of these woman looking at them. Gaignard also includes her "selfie" culture in this exhibit by placing herself as the focus of particular photographs.

External Links

1. http://www.shulamitnazarian.com/exhibition/genevieve-gaignard/
2. https://caamuseum.org/exhibitions/2016/genevieve-gaignard-smell-the-roses
3. https://hcponline.org/exhibit/in-passing-genevieve-gaignard/
4. https://www.prospectneworleans.org/p4-artists-1/2017/5/24/genevieve-gaignard
5. https://www.praz-delavallade.com/exhibition/genevieve-gaignard-2018
6. http://flagartfoundation.org/exhibitions/counterfeit-currency/