Ken Gonzales-Day

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.

[16][19] 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.

[31][32][33] 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.

"[26] 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"[37] and "marvelous patterns assembled like a mosaic.

[3][29][16] More performative than documentary—since many exact locations are unknown—the series' recordings and approximations feature stark, large-scale color portraits of trees, often set against flat, black backgrounds that range, according to reviews, from quietly beautiful to ordinary suburban to vaguely ominous (e.g. Nightfall I, 2007).

[50][49][51][52] In several exhibitions, Gonzales-Day juxtaposed the hang trees with his "Memento Mori" bust-length, frontal portraits of contemporary Latino men matching the lynching victims in age and ethnicity, which reviewers describe as similarly "elegant, muscular and mute.

[2][11][52][53] Leah Ollman wrote, the film's "episodic and discontinuous, mildly haunting" approach shifts actions between cover of night and light of day, "conjuring the lynching's variable realities as suppressed history and public spectacle.

[2][11][52] Gonzales-Day's Profiled explores the legacies of slavery, colonialism and imperialism, and Western assumptions about beauty and human value through ethnological depictions in historic expositions and museum collections, methods of art instruction, and pseudo-sciences, such as physiognomy and mesmerism.

[54][55][29][58] Critic Sharon Mizota writes that in works such as one with facing black marble busts—one African, one recognizably Caucasian (see image, right)—what emerges "is something more tender and strange… the impassive sculptural pairs begin to look oddly like couples, gazing at each other across boundaries of geography, time and ignorance.

[64][65] Gonzales-Day has produced permanent public art works as well as temporary billboard installations of images from his "Erased Lynching" and "Profiled" series, some included as part of a For Freedoms fifty-state voting Initiative ahead of the 2018 U.S. mid-term elections.

[66] His commission for a LAPD Metro Division Facility (2016) offers eleven porcelain-enamel photographs of cultural artifacts that represent people, real and imagined, from various continents and eras and comment on philosophical, spiritual, legal and scientific constructions of race and racial difference.