Ken Gonzales-Day (born 1964) is a Los Angeles-based conceptual artist best known for interdisciplinary projects that examine the historical construction of race, identity, and systems of representation including lynching photographs, museum display and street art.Zellen, Jody. "Ken Gonzales-Day: 'Profiled/Hang Trees/ Portraits' at Luis De Jesus," Art Ltd., January–February 2013.Ollman, Leah. "Gonzales-Day fills the holes of history," Los Angeles Times, April 10, 2015. Retrieved March 5, 2020.Knight, Christopher. "Ken Gonzales-Day's pointed portraits at Luis De Jesus," Los Angeles Times, November 9, 2012 Retrieved March 5, 2020.Villafranca, David. "Los Angeles se mira en el espejo de su arte callejero," La Capital de Mar del Plata, October 9, 2017. Retrieved March 5, 2020. His widely exhibited "Erased Lynching" photographic series and book, Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 (2006),Gonzales-Day, Ken. "Lynching in the West: 1850–1935," Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Retrieved March 5, 2020. document the absence in historical accounts of the lynching of Latinos, Native Americans and Asians in California's early history.Bryan-Wilson, Julia. "'Phantom Sightings', Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)," Artforum, Summer 2008, p. 432–3. Retrieved March 5, 2020.Berger, Maurice. "Lynchings in the West, Erased from History and Photos," The New York Times, LENS Blog, December 6, 2012. Retrieved March 5, 2020.Estes, Steve. "Lynching in the West," Journal of Southern History, May 2008, p. 453. The series has toured in traveling exhibitions staged by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA),Knight, Christopher. "'Phantom Sightings' at LACMA," Los Angeles Times, April 15, 2008. Smithsonian InstitutionRamos, E. Carmen. "Ken Gonzales-Day," Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2014, p. 182–9. and Minnesota Museum of American Art,Berdan, Kathy. "Art inspired by lynchings in 'Shadowlands' exhibit at Minnesota Museum of American Art," Twin Cities Pioneer Press, January 17, 2017. Retrieved March 6, 2020. and appeared at the Tamayo Museum (Mexico City), Generali Foundation (Vienna) and Palais de Tokyo in Paris, among other venues.Carson, Juli. "Exile of the Imaginary: Politics, Aesthetics, Love," in Exile of the Imaginary: Politics, Aesthetics, Love, Vienna: Generali Foundation, 2007.Wahler, Marc-Olivier and Mark Alizart and Frederic Grossi (eds). 2009 A-Z: Palais de Tokyo, Paris: Palais de Tokyo, 2009, p. 61, 84–6.Neumann, Marc. "Lynching in den USA: Auch der Mob mordet mit System," Neue Burcher Zeitung (Zurich), July 13, 2018. Retrieved March 9, 2020.John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. "Ken Gonzales-Day," Fellows. Retrieved March 5, 2020.
Los Angeles Times critic Holly Myers writes that Gonzales-Day's work conveys "a palpable quality of tenderness" through a "delicate form of visual ethics" that explores racial tendencies, perceptions and presumptions "without pinning the dialogue to actual individuals";Myers, Holly. "In the Studio: Ken Gonzales-Day," Los Angeles Times, February 13, 2011. Retrieved March 5, 2020. curator Gonzalo Casals describes his method as "simple artistic gesture[s] that allow for the reinterpretation of history, opening up new perspectives and allowing for the voices of the 'other' to rise above the official history."Artnet. "Tear Down the Confederate Monuments—But What Next? 12 Art Historians and Scholars on the Way Forward," Artnet, August 23, 2017. Retrieved March 6, 2020. Gonzales-Day was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in photography in 2017, and is the Fletcher Jones Chair in Art at Scripps College in Claremont, California.Artforum. "Guggenheim Foundation Announces 2017 Fellows," April 7, 2017. Retrieved March 5, 2020.Scripps College. Ken Gonzales-Day, Faculty Profiles. Retrieved March 5, 2020.
Early life and education
Gonzales-Day was born in Santa Clara, California in 1964 to parents of mixed ethnicity and grew up in Northern California and Idaho; his father's family dates back to 17th-century New Mexico. He studied art at Pratt Institute (BFA, 1987, Painting) and art history at Hunter College in New York City (MA, 1991), before moving back to California, with his partner and husband, Gary Wolf (together since 1989); Mr. Wolf worked in the hospitality field with Westin, Hyatt and The Peninsula group. Gonzales-Day went on to earn an MFA at University of California, Irvine (1995).
In his first professional decade, Gonzales-Day was a practicing artist and critic, contributing regular reviews and articles to the publications Artissues, ART/TEXT and Leonardo, and books including Whiteness: A Wayward Construction (2003) and The Queer Encyclopedia of the Visual Arts (2004), among others.Gonzales-Day, Ken. "Marsden Hartley," Artissues, July/August 1998.Gonzales-Day, Ken. "Daniel J. Martinez," ART/TEXT, October/November 2002.Gonzales-Day, Ken. "Analytical Photography: Portraiture, from the Index to the Epidermis," Leonardo: Journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, Vol. 35, No. 1, 2002, p. 23–30.Myers, Holly. "White Noise," LA Weekly, April 24, 2003. Retrieved March 9, 2020.Gonzales-Day, Ken. "Seeing Gray: Whiteness and the Erasure of Difference," in Whiteness: A Wayward Construction, Tyler Stallings (ed.), Laguna Beach/Los Angeles: Laguna Art Museum/Fellows of Contemporary Art, 2003. Retrieved March 9, 2020.Gonzales-Day, Ken. "Photography, Gay Male: Pre-Stonewall" and other articles, in The Queer Encyclopedia of the Visual Arts, Claude J. Summers (ed.), San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2004. He began teaching at Scripps College in 1995, serving as Professor of Art and Chair of the Art and Art and Art History departments through various terms.
Work and reception
Writers consider Gonzales-Day an artist and historian whose larger project (art and research) seeks to broaden the established canons of art and history to recognize those who have been erased, ignored or misrepresented due to race, ethnicity or sexuality.Gerwin, Daniel. "An Artist Reimagines His Ancestors Through Costumed Self- Portraits," Hyperallergic, October 20, 2017. Retrieved March 6, 2020.Mizota, Sharon. "Ken Gonzales-Day at Las Cienegas projects," Los Angeles Times, March 25, 2011. Retrieved March 5, 2020.Caldwell, Ellen C. "Ken Gonzales-Day's Bone-Grass Boy: The Secret Banks of the Conejos River," Riot Material, January 28, 2018. Retrieved March 5, 2020. His conceptually oriented photography often focuses on historical gaps, literalized through prominent blank spaces or "visual silences";Mizota, Sharon. "Ken Gonzales-Day Re-Examines Violence, Race, and Identity," KCET, November 28, 2012. Retrieved March 5, 2020. critic Leah Ollman writes that his work instructs through the framing of holes in the record and collapsing of space between different times and places, "disturb[ing] in direct proportion to its importance." His work also draws on restorative justice practices that seek reconciliation, restitution, the recovery of history and public dialogue to remedy injustice.Caragol, Taína. "Recognition of Major Osage Leader and Warrior Opens a New Window Into History," Smithsonian Magazine, February 19, 2020 Retrieved March 5, 2020.
Early work
Gonzales-Day's early art focuses on issues surrounding identity, multiculturalism and prejudice—which relate to his own liminal position as a gay Mexican-American—and on broader social concerns, including the AIDS crisis, queer rights, and immigration.Osberg, Annabel. "Galerías en LA/LA: Spotlight," Artillery, September/October 2017, p. 48.Curtis, Cathy. "A Safe Tamale," Los Angeles Times (Orange County), December 7, 1993, p. F2. Retrieved March 9, 2020.Curtis, Cathy. "1997: A Space Oddity," Los Angeles Times, August 5, 1997, p. F2. Retrieved March 9, 2020. Bone Grass Boy: The Secret Banks of the Conejos River (1993–6, recreated in 2017) explores these issues through the lens of his family's complex genealogy, which he re-envisioned as an invented Mexican–American War-era narrative whose partial text is presented as a historical artifact.Goldman, Edward. "Is It Clay? No, Glass! Is It Woman? No, Man!" HuffPost, September 12, 2017. Retrieved March 5, 2020.Fragoza, Caribbean. "What Is Latin American Art? Finding Answers at Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA," LA Weekly, September 12, 2017. Retrieved March 5, 2020. The project combines the appropriation of master-painting poses and scenes, Pictures Generation-style costumed self-portraiture, and early digital imaging techniques in photographic tableaux in which Gonzales-Day portrays a wide cast of female and male ancestors/characters.Black, Ezrha Jean. "Ken Gonzales-Day," Artillery, November 7, 2017. Retrieved March 5, 2020. His reassembled version added installation elements, including full-wall genealogical and regional mural-map renderings. Artillery'''s Annabel Osberg calls it "a conceptual yet cuttingly poignant photo-novella"; other reviewers described it as eerily timeless and timely, historical and futuristic, with a "ghostly sensuality."
Gonzales-Day's photography of the later 1990s and early 2000s explored similar issues, often through extreme close-up images of skin lesions and growths, tattoos or body parts that reviewers described as "ominous [and] strangely seductive"Ise, Claudine. "Examining Consequences of Medical Advances," Los Angeles Times, December 11, 1998, p. F36. Retrieved March 5, 2020. and "marvelous patterns assembled like a mosaic."Ollman, Leah. "High Anxiety Over High-Tech Humanity," Los Angeles Times, May 12, 2001, p. F1 & F10. Retrieved March 5, 2020.Curtis, Cathy. "Dressing the Flesh," Los Angeles Times, May 12, 1998, p. F2.
"Erased Lynching" series (2002–17) and related works The Erased Lynchings series arose out of research Gonzales-Day conducted that uncovered more than 350 lynchings of Latinos, Native Americans and Asians as well as African-Americans in California between 1850 and 1935, the most perpetrated against Latinos.Cotter, Holland. "Ken Gonzales-Day," The New York Times, September 22, 2006, p. 32. Retrieved March 9, 2020.Hill, Jason. "The Camera and the 'Physiognomic Auto-da-fe': Photography, History, and Race in Two Recent Works by Ken Gonzales-Day," X-TRA, Spring 2009. Retrieved March 5, 2020. Its images range from postcard-sized works to photomurals and billboard reproductions and are derived from appropriated lynching souvenir cards and archival sources, from which Gonzales-Day digitally removed the victim and rope (e.g., The Wonder Gaze (St. James Park), 2006–17). Critics suggest that the erasure crucially recalibrates the power of each image, redirecting scrutiny away from death to the spectacle, social dynamics, and relish of the perpetrators (often jeering and smiling disconcertingly); New York Times critic Holland Cotter notes that this shift also "makes hard lines between then and now, them and us, difficult to draw." The erasures additionally serve as a metaphor for the expunging of the victims from history and prevent their re-victimization through re-presentation.