Mixed Race Studies

Looking at [Genevieve] Gaignard’s work, you can see what she might be trying to work through—feelings of home, identity, family, and belonging. Being biracial and, more recently, bicoastal (having been away from her L.A. home during the residency), there’s a sense of a constant effort of recentering and reworking through a whole host of feelings that’s relatable for many people, especially during this time of reckoning with the state of race, health, and politics in our country. “Sometimes I think, ‘How many feelings can you hold on to?’” she said. “I can put this particular feeling here or this mood can live here,” she added, nodding to the way her works become vessels for her emotions and concerns.

Dominique Clayton, “Genevieve Gaignard’s Timely Work Documents Racial Injustice and Calls for Change,” Artsy, October 13, 2020. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-genevieve-gaignards-timely-work-documents-racial-injustice-calls-change.

Genevieve Gaignard’s Timely Work Documents Racial Injustice and Calls for Change

Artsy
2020-10-13

Dominique Clayton

Genevieve Gaignard, ​Trailblazer (A Dream Deferred)​, 2017. ©Genevieve Gaignard. Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles.

In a period when many are glued to their devices, waiting for the latest updates on the upcoming election or ongoing pandemic, it’s hard for creatives to focus on new projects and work. Yet for artists like Genevieve Gaignard, who retreated to an artist residency shortly after the onset of the pandemic, this time has served as the catalyst for continuing to create groundbreaking work that speaks to our past, present, and future.

Gaignard recently returned to Los Angeles, where she is based, after spending roughly five months at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams, Massachusetts. There, she completed the inaugural Artist’s Laboratory residency program and opened a new exhibition at MCLA Gallery 51, titled “A Long Way From Home.” Both initiatives are led by the director of the Berkshire Cultural Resource Center Erica Wall, a Black gallerist and curator who previously ran her own space in Santa Ana, California. “Genevieve is such a deep and amazingly prolific artist, whose work reflects her laser focus and commitment to documenting and illuminating racial injustice in the U.S. over time, in real time,” Wall said. “Social media can hardly keep up with her!”

While the effects of COVID-19 caused all of the programming around the residency and the exhibition to move online, Gaignard and Wall made virtual magic happen by pivoting to a series of workshops, sessions, and a lovely exhibition opening via Zoom. There, alongside other artists and supporters, I witnessed the big reveal of Gaignard’s latest work, which brought on a combination of laughter and tears…

Read the entire article here.

Born into Slavery, Joshua Johnson Became the First Black Professional Artist in the United States

Artsy
2020-07-16

Jaelynn Walls, Curator and Writer
Houston, Texas

Joshua Johnson Family Group, ca. 1800 National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

Historians know woefully little about Joshua Johnson, the first professional African American artist to work in the United States. An active painter in Maryland and Virginia from roughly the 1790s to 1825, Johnson was all but forgotten until the middle of the 20th century. In 1939, Baltimore genealogist and art historian J. Hall Pleasants attributed 13 paintings to Johnson and began the long journey of reconstructing his career through scraps of often contradictory information. Even the artist’s last name is uncertain, and many art historians are still debating whether it was spelled “Johnson” or “Johnston.”

Johnson was born into slavery in mid-18th-century Maryland to a white man and a Black slave woman owned by William Wheeler Sr. Chattel records note his race as mulatto, though Maryland had no legal definition for what constituted “Black” versus “mixed race” at the time. Pleasants located documents variously describing Johnson as a slave, a slave trained as a blacksmith, a Black servant afflicted with consumption, and an immigrant from the West Indies.

While much of Johnson’s history remains mysterious, his special place in art history is assured. The next renowned African American artists to emerge in the United States, Robert S. Duncanson and Henry Ossawa Tanner, followed Johnson by decades…

Read the entire article here.