Lunder Institute for American Art Welcomes Genevieve Gaignard

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The Lunder Institute for American Art is excited to announce that multidisciplinary artist Genevieve Gaignard will visit for two weeks in the month of March to work with Waterville area students, Colby students, and local community. She will return as a resident fellow for the summer and fall of 2023.

As part of her spring residency, Gaignard will participate in a live conversation with Jon Gray, curator and co-founder of the culinary collective Ghetto Gastro.

Established in 2021, Lunder Institute residential fellowships provide artists with spacious studios as well as opportunities for collaboration with Colby College faculty, students, and staff, the Waterville community, and the Maine arts community. This studio program, based out of the Greene Block + Studios in downtown Waterville, Maine, encompasses artists at all stages of their careers and working in a range of artistic disciplines and mediums. Resident fellows are provided with housing and a stipend, have access to Colby College campus facilities, and are in dialogue with local organizations and community members.

Gaignard (b.1981) uses self-portraiture, collage, sculpture, and installation to elicit dialogue around the intricacies of race, beauty, and cultural identity. Referencing regional and historical events, as well as a personal archive as a biracial woman, Gaignard creates environments that teeter between symbolic and autobiographical realms. She cleverly interrogates notions of skin privilege while challenging viewers to look more closely at racial realities. The ensemble of her work shatters viewers’ perceptions of culture and race, compelling them to piece together novel ways of perceiving the world and their place in it.

Since 2019, Gaignard has debuted six solo exhibitions and participated in numerous countrywide group shows. Last year, she presented two solo exhibitions: To Whom it May Concern with Rowan University Art Gallery and Strange Fruit with Vielmetter Los Angeles. Gaignard’s work has appeared at: The Broad, CA; The Nerman Museum, KS; Stephen Friedman Gallery, UK; The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, TX; The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The Getty Center, CA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, MA; and Prospect.4, LA. In July 2022, Gaignard partnered with Orange Barrel Media on Look At Them Look At Us: a permanent, site-specific public art installation in downtown Atlanta. Gaignard received her bachelor of fine arts in photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and her master of fine arts in photography from Yale University. She splits her time between her hometown of Orange, Mass, and Los Angeles.

Gaignard will join current residential fellows Heather Flor Cron, a queer Peruvian-American farmer, performer & transdisciplinary artist based in Portland, Tessa Greene O’Brien, a Maine-based artist and curator with a multi-faceted painting practice, and Dylan Hausthor, an artist based on the coast of Maine, who joined the Lunder Institute’s residential fellowship program during the fall 2022 semester.

Learn more about this group of artists and read their bios on our Spring 2023 Resident Fellows page.

Image: Genevieve Gaignard, photography by Charlsie Gorski.