Lunder Institute Resident Fellows
Established in 2021, the Lunder Institute residential fellowships provide artists with spacious studios as well as opportunities for collaboration with Colby College faculty, students, staff, and the Waterville community. This new studio program, which is based at the Greene Block + Studios at 18 Main Street in downtown Waterville, 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.
Genevieve Gaignard (b.1981) is a multidisciplinary artist who 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, Massachusetts, and Los Angeles.
Papay Solomon (b. 1993, Guinea) marshals the language of portraiture to complexify African narratives beyond dominant discourses. As simultaneously African and American, Solomon’s practice extends what it means to be an African in America and how one’s “authentic” Africaness” can be expressed and maintained across generational and continental divides. Solomon’s work reflects both his formative experiences in United Nations refugee camps and his life after relocating with his family to the United States at the age of 14. Solomon therefore defines home as neither fixed or necessarily a structure, rather a way of being in the world.
