Genevieve Gaignard: Performing Race through Self-Portraiture

• In Event: Alternative Views: Photography, Self-Representation and Fact in Contemporary American Art and Culture

Abstract

In the fall of 2016, Genevieve Gaignard exhibited her color photographs in the exhibition Smell the Roses, at the California African American Museum (CAAM). The artworks, from an ongoing series of self-portraiture, are steeped in ethnic and racial ambiguity. Gaignard problematizes stereotypes and racial categories through the employment of her physical body. She visually disrupts the ongoing polarity of our racial systems by her performance of multiple identities. Through her costuming and selected landscapes, Gaignard illustrates the quotidian and oftentimes banal activities of a diverse cast of Americans. The triumph of these performed characters is made possible through Gaignard’s very own ambiguity: she is mixed race. Born in Orange, Massachusetts to a Black father and white mother, the pale skinned, red-haired Gaignard generally “passed” as white.

This paper will examine the use of Gaignard’s racial genealogy and physical features to disrupt notions of “truth” both in our conceptions of race and the complexities of the veracious photograph. Pushing back against the reflexive tendencies of art critics and cultural historians to draw comparisons between Gaignard and the venerable Cindy Sherman, I intend to situate her in the genre of performative self-portraiture created by ethnically ambiguous artists of color such as Adrian Piper and Nikki S. Lee. The self-portrait constitutes a large number of contemporary Black female photographers, akin to Gaignard, making for a rich corpus of self-representations that necessitate an engagement with the Black feminist archive in order to reimagine visual histories that have failed or as Jennifer Nash describes, wounded the Black female body. Culling from Cherise Smith’s work on passing and racial performance and Uri McMillian’s recent investigations of Black feminist performance art and the embodied avatar, this paper will approach Gaignard’s aesthetic of an everyday American to trouble the facile notions of racial division. Finally, the paper will demonstrate the significance of Gaignard’s first solo museum exhibition taking place in CAAM; a space which consistently rebels against fixed and preconceived notions of what it means to be “Black” in America. Gaignard’s artwork, and by extension her body, relies on the representational fluidity of race and class. As we witness her embodied stereotypes across the spectrum of race (Black, White, and Latina); American culture is made visible as well. Through Gaignard’s multiplicity we visualize the potential for boundless American identities steeped in various accessories and personalities rather than race; photographs inherently resistant to the divisive climate of the current United States but made all the more powerful when placed on the walls of a Black institution.

Author

• Delphine Marie Sims, University of California, Berkeley