Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Video, Installation, Performance, Sculpture
Website: genevievequick.com
Genevieve Quick is a San Francisco-based interdisciplinary artist, arts writer, and critic. She received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her practice spans video, installation, performance, and sculpture, and her work explores global identity, diaspora, and the politics of cultural communication through speculative science fiction narratives rooted in Asian American experience.
Quick has held residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Recology San Francisco, Montalvo Arts Center (as a Lucas Artists Fellow), MacDowell, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the de Young Museum, Yaddo, and Faberlull. She has received grants from Artadia (2024 San Francisco Bay Area Awardee), the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Fleishhacker Foundation (Eureka Grant), the Kala Art Institute, and the Center for Cultural Innovation. In parallel with her studio practice, she has contributed critical writing to Artforum, C Magazine, Art Practical, 48 Hills, and Temporary Art Review.
Quick works across video, installation, performance, and sculpture, building a sustained conceptual universe around “Planet Celadon” — a fictional world whose name references the distinctive jade-green glaze of East Asian ceramic tradition. Within this invented cosmology, she deploys recurring characters — among them an Asianaut, a scuba diver, a narwhal, and living vases — to explore the alienness of the Asian American diaspora through humor and absurdist spectacle. Her installations frequently operate as participatory environments, inviting visitors into interactive video games, room-scale sculptural environments, and live performances that collapse the boundaries between science fiction fantasy, cultural memory, and popular culture.
Her work is characterized by a playful sensibility that draws on Busby Berkeley choreography, drag aesthetics, the history of East Asian ceramics, and Carl Sagan’s Voyager Golden Record, using these references to probe questions of communication across cultural distance — between generations, between diasporic communities and homelands, and in her more speculative registers, between Earth and the intergalactic civilizations she invents. The result is a body of work that, in her own words, is “joyful and humorous” while affirming narratives of difference and displacement.
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