Recently I was working on adding Custom Post Type – Portfolio in a widget on Home page. An example of that would be Portfolio display on my Home Page.
Each portfolio piece is a custom post type that gets added dynamically as I include a new piece.
In Genesis there is a default widget – Genesis Featured Posts, but it won’t display Custom Post Types.
There is a plugin, called Genesis Sandbox Featured Content
You can drag it into a widget, and set which custom post type to display, and also you can add a column class to it. In my case I added one-third column class (Genesis framework). It makes it super easy to display widget content in columns instead of rows.