Notes On “Profiled”

Since its rise in the nineteenth century, physiognomy — the study of human nature based on outward appearance — has been rejected as a pseudoscience, along with other codifying inquiries that have fueled our ideas about inherited supremacy, like phrenology, eugenics, and anthropological criminology.

But these obsolete ideas are still quietly bolstered by centuries of sculpture occupying our museums, institutions, and public squares, further contributing to skewed notions about how we represent race. The artist Ken Gonzales-Day takes art history to task on this account through his series, Profiled, which forages through our cultural warehouses to assemble a concise inventory of racial depictions, and re-imagines the canon of Western European art as mug shots, thereby reconnecting it to facial stereotyping in the twenty-first century. 

Through the simplest of rhetorical devices, juxtaposition, he allows this history to speak for itself, placing otherwise mute subjects in dialogue. In his work, they are transformed into characters, and as Gonzales-Day reminds us, "They are not in the darkness of night, nor are they in the light of day. It is a photograph. It is a stage."

Avram Finkelstein and David Zinn
Co-Curators