Genevieve Gaignard

Genevieve Gaignard (b. 1981) is a multidisciplinary artist who splits her time between Massachusetts, the Bronx, and Los Angeles. Her perspective is shaped by her experience as a biracial woman navigating the complexities of American identity, history, and culture, which grounds the conceptual foundations of her practice. Gaignard’s work investigates personal histories, popular culture, and racial dynamics, creating visually and emotionally layered environments that prompt viewers to reflect on the tensions between private identity, public life, and contemporary social conditions.

 

Working across photography, collage, sculpture, and installation, she uses soft color palettes, humor, domesticity, and a sense of haunting nostalgia to activate spaces that evoke America’s past-as-present. Her staged photographic self-portraits present invented yet familiar personae that challenge social hierarchies and beauty standards. Vintage wallpaper drawn from childhood memory appears throughout her collages, sculptures, and installations, supporting compositions built from found objects, historical media, and vernacular imagery. Through xerographic collage, she meditates on archival images; through sculpture and installation, she reimagines antique furniture and figurines into psychologically charged spaces of both sanctuary and resistance. Across these mediums, Gaignard critiques cultural symbols of Whiteness, affirms Black livelihood, and constructs visual narratives that explore the frictions between personal and collective realities.

Gaignard’s work has been widely exhibited in institutions such as the Nerman Museum, the Rennie Museum in Vancouver, Canada, The Broad, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Blanton Museum of Art, The Getty, the National Portrait Gallery, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and The Studio Museum in Harlem. Recent solo exhibitions include Thinking Out Loud 2024 at Vielmetter Los Angeles. Recent 2025 museum exhibitions include Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gaignard also curated the group exhibition Stop and Stare for UTA Artist Space in Atlanta. In 2022, she partnered with Orange Barrel Media on Look At Them Look At Us, a permanent public installation in downtown Atlanta. Gaignard received her BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and her MFA from Yale University. She lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, and Orange, MA.