In this video at Frieze New York, artist Genevieve Gaignard explains how the repetitions of the past, and her childhood home, inform her approach to race and class in the present.
This year marks the 250th anniversary of the United States. Among the numerous official celebrations of this in 2026, at Frieze New York, Brooklyn’s Jenkins Johnson Gallery is offering a darker take on the semiquincentennial.
The gallery is showing four artists from the African diaspora across different generations: Gordon Parks and Wadsworth Jarrell (born respectively 1912 and 1929), and Lola Flash and Genevieve Gaignard (born 1959 and 1981).
In this video shot at the fair, Gaignard explains how her work in the presentation responds to that of the other artists, and the themes that her work addresses, notably how the idea of a ‘united’ country can relate – or fail to relate – to individual identity, especially around race and class.
‘“We the people” are the first words of our constitution,’ she says. ‘I’m really asking the viewers to consider who does the “we” represent?’
Gaignard’s practice often uses historical and found materials to explore changing perceptions and representations of racial identity, a subject whose complexity is reflected in her collages, photographs and installations. ‘Pulling from the past feels like a natural thing to do,’ she says, ‘because I think often we’re repeating history.’
Gaignard is inspired by Parks’s photography, which helped change the way that Black America was seen, as well as how it saw itself. The mirror is a key element of Gaignard’s work: ‘it forces the viewer to not only look at the work but how they are involved in it.’ Her works for Frieze New York also incorporate 1960s wallpaper, something she recalls from the home she grew up in, and a further nod to the idea of environments reflecting and projecting alternative histories and aspirational identities.
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