Ken Gonzales-Day

Untitled (Antico, Bust of a Young Man, and Francis Harwood, Bust of a Man), 2008-12. LightJet print on aluminum. 20 x 64 in. Edition of 5, 2 AP.

The Public Art Series continues with Mexican-American artist Ken Gonzales-Day, whose work illuminates how difference, otherness, and identity emerge through acts of seeing. His photographs of historical artifacts — ranging from archival postcards to marble busts — reveal the constructedness of racial categories and hierarchies alike. Using digital editing software, he experiments with absence, juxtaposition, and context in order to expose how we have been taught to see. On view at Playwrights Horizons, his Profiled project places sculptures of human figures from Asia, Colombia, Japan, Mexico, Northern Europe, Singapore, and the United States in unexpected encounters with one another — not unlike many characters from many plays sharing a single stage. These likenesses reveal a stunning range of ideas of beauty and imaginaries of race, inviting us to reckon with our definitions and representations of both, from wherever we stand as the viewer (or sit in the audience).

About Ken Gonzales-Day 
Ken Gonzales-Day’s interdisciplinary and conceptually grounded photographic projects consider the history of photography, the construction of race, and the limits of representational systems. Gonzales-Day is a Getty scholar and a Terra Foundation and Smithsonian Museum fellow. In 2018, he was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. A former Chair and current professor of art at Scripps College, Gonzales-Day’s exhaustive research and book Lynching in the West, 1850-1935 (2006) led to a re-evaluation of the history of lynching in this country. The book shed light on the little-known history of frontier justice and vigilantism and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. The Erased Lynchings series of photographs was a product of this research, which revealed that race was a contributing factor in California's own history of lynching and vigilantism, and through which he discovered that the majority of victims were Mexican or, like him, Mexican-American. Gonzales-Day takes the same scholarly approach to his ongoing Profiled series, which looks to the depiction of race and the construction of whiteness in the representation of the human form as points of departure from which to consider the evolution and transformation of Enlightenment ideas about beauty, class, freedom, and progress. The series was awarded the first Photo Arts Council Prize (PAC) by LACMA and documented in a handsome monograph. It is Gonzales-Day’s continual engagement with history and his interest in peeling back the layers that makes his work so powerful and continuously relevant.

Untitled (Malvina Hoffman, Barefoot Man [337236], The Field Museum, Chicago and Jean-Jacques-Francois Saly, Faun Holding Goat, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles), 2009-12. LightJet print on dibond. 45.5 x 73.5 in. Edition of 5, 2 AP.

41 Objects Arranged by Color, 2016. Lightjet print on Dibond, UV plexi. 34 x 92 inches (w/ border), 30 x 88 inches (image). Edition of 3, 2 AP

Untitled (Pierre-Jean David d’Angers, Bust of Ann Buchan Robinson, Museum of City of New York; Joseph Nollekensm Venus, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Malvina Hoffman, Japanese Woman [337087], The Field Museum, Chicago; Malvina Hoffman, Eskimo Woman [337060]), The Field Museum, Chicago), 2009-2011. LightJet print on aluminum. 23 x 61.5 in. Edition of 3, 2 AP.

Untitled: Bust of an African Woman by Henry Weeks; marble, 1859; The J. Paul Getty Museum. Los Angeles and Bust of Mm. Adélaïde Julie Mirleau de Newville, née Garnier d'Isle by Jean-Baptiste Pigalle; marble, 1750s; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2009. Archival ink on rag paper. 32 × 60 in. Edition of 5, 2 AP.

The National Portrait Gallery program cover for the exhibition "UnSeen: Our Past in a New Light, Ken Gonzales-Day and Titus Kaphar" by Taína Caragol in 2019. See the full program here.

"Ken Gonzales-Day" by Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, read more about Ken's work here.

Bust of a Man, commentary by Ken Gonzales-Day for the Yale Center for British Art.

"Ken Gonzales-Day Searches the Smithsonian Archives and Finds Incomplete Histories," Shana Lutker in conversation with Ken Gonzales-Day for Curationist.