Genevieve Gaignard

Genevieve Gaignard (b. 1981) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work investigates personal histories, popular culture, and racial dynamics through the lens of lived experience. Drawing from her perspective as a biracial woman navigating contemporary American life, Gaignard examines the complexities of identity, memory, class, and representation. Her practice often incorporates self portraiture and performance, using soft color palettes, humor, and domestic imagery to construct environments that invite critical reflection. Her compositions frequently evoke a layered nostalgia, positioning America’s past as an ever present force within contemporary social and political realities.

Working across photography, collage, sculpture, and installation, Gaignard treats each medium as a site of introspection and cultural inquiry. Her staged photographic self portraits present a range of invented yet familiar personas that challenge social hierarchies and conventional beauty standards. Vintage wallpaper, drawn from childhood memory, recurs throughout her practice as both surface and symbol, activating collages, sculptures, and installations composed of found objects and archival imagery. Through xerographic collage, she engages historical media as a process of excavation and reinterpretation. In sculpture and installation, antique furniture, décor, and figurines are reconfigured into psychologically charged spaces that transform domestic environments into sites of sanctuary, resistance, and self definition. Across these forms, Gaignard reclaims and subverts visual languages historically associated with whiteness, repositioning them as tools of critique and affirmation.

Recent exhibitions include the solo exhibition Thinking Out Loud at Vielmetter Los Angeles and the curated group exhibition Stop and Stare at UTA Artist Space, Atlanta. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park; the Rennie Museum, Vancouver; The Broad, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the San José Museum of Art; the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin; the Getty Center, Los Angeles; the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. In 2022, Gaignard partnered with Orange Barrel Media on Look At Them Look At Us, a permanent site specific public art installation in downtown Atlanta.