By Chistopher Knight

“Ken Gonzales-Day: History’s ‘Nevermade’” offers a sharp retrospective of an artist who explores the way social erasure of identity — race, gender, class — operates in American life.

Beginning around 2002, Gonzales-Day began to alter largely forgotten old photographs that document the mob ruthlessness of lynching, an astounding brutality that helped shape the history of the American West.

The USC Fisher Museum of Art is too small to accommodate a full Gonzales-Day retrospective, but it’s still worth seeing. Its focus on the shredding of civil society is timely.

By David S. Rubin

LOS ANGELES — Ken Gonzales-Day is both an artist and a scholar: Most of his art projects result from extensive research, and some have been published in book form. As revealed in the illuminating exhibition History’s “Nevermade” at the University of Southern California’s Fisher Museum of Art, Gonzales-Day has spent over three decades studying and responding to the absence of people like himself — gay and Latinx — from historical records. As the Trump administration attempts to purge any such content from the Smithsonian museums, a presentation of the artist’s projects could not be any timelier.

By Matt Stromberg

LA-based artist Ken Gonzales-Day invented the term “nevermade” to refer to invented historical documents that call attention to who constructs mainstream narratives and why. This mid-career survey brings together more than 100 works from the past three decades that look at how race, culture, and identity are portrayed in the US. The show includes his haunting investigation of lynching, Searching for California Hang Trees (2002–ongoing); his series of Decolonial Drawings, recreated period scenes from Spanish colonization with conquistadors and Native people removed; and Profiled, a photographic series that reveals how sculptural busts reflect ideas of race, physiognomy, and purity.

By Carolina A. Miranda

That idea, of the ways the land bears a record of terrible histories, was rattling around my head when I went to see Ken Gonzales-Day’s new survey at the USC Fisher Museum of Art late last month. 

The LA artist is perhaps best known for his project, Searching for California Hang Trees, begun in 2000. It consists of a series of magnificent landscape photographs that depict trees used in lynchings. The majority of the victims of these attacks were non-White, primarily Mexican. And to look upon the sites of their deaths is to see landscapes that, if not physically marked by this past, nonetheless feel haunted. The remarkable Nightfall II, from 2006, which extends to a width of almost 7 ft., and is on view at the Fisher, shows the branches of what appears to be an Indian Laurel Fig extending into the inky darkness of night. What specters might inhabit its trunk?

By Shana Nys Dambrot

A thoughtfully curated Pride Month exhibition celebrates the gallery’s love of material narrative, in an exploration of “queer strategies” of visual communication and as a modality through which to engage art history and contemporary art-making. Artists Amy Adler, John Brooks, Josh Cabello, Pui Tiffany Chow, Zackary Drucker, Rubén Esparza, Ken Gonzales-Day, Jonathan VanDyke, and Jwan Yosef employ painting, drawing, photography, textiles, assemblage, and poetry to muse on themes of “relationality, empathy, intimacy, representation, subversion, and the queer sublime.” 

The Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts announced on April 24 the appointment of artist Ken Gonzales-Day, museum leader Lisa Mark and artist Cauleen Smith to its board of directors. They join Chair Edward Rada and members Elizabeth Armstrong, Connie Butler, Gianna Drake-Kerrison, Claire Peeps and Pilar Tompkins Rivas.

The Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts appointed artist Ken Gonzales-Day, museum leader Lisa Mark and artist Cauleen Smith to its board of directors. They join chair Edward Rada and members Elizabeth Armstrong, Connie Butler, Gianna Drake-Kerrison, Claire Peeps and Pilar Tompkins Rivas.

Below, a look back at the greatest 100 artworks of the 21st century so far, as selected by the editors of ARTnews and Art in America.

99) Ken Gonzales-Day, "Erashed Lynching," 2022–
In the uneasy images from this series, crowds of people look up at trees or poles that seem totally unremarkable. In fact, those trees once contained something horrifying: lynched Latinx, Asian, and Native American men. These lynchings have not often been recognized in the historical record, and Ken Gonzales-Day wanted to call attention to them. Rather than reproduce the bodies of these men, however, Gonzales-Day used image editing software to remove them. The focus here, instead, is the white people who attended the lynchings, creating a public spectacle of this brutality and then circulating images of it via postcards, which the artist collected. Gonzales-Day’s jarring images force viewers to reckon with a form of collective violence that is perpetrated by regular people, frequently with little to no consequences. —M.D.

Composition in Black and Brown is part of Profiled (2008–), an photographic series that grew out of his research into the history of racial depictions in exhibitions and museum displays. Gonzales-Day has brought this project not only to the Yale Center for British Art and the Yale Peabody Museum but also to the J. Paul Getty Museum, Chicago’s Field Museum, the Trocadero Museum in Paris, the archive of the 1915–16 California-Panama Exposition in San Diego’s Balboa Park, and many others.

Presented in conjunction with the Wende Museum’s Counter/Surveillance exhibition and co-presented with the History of Science Society, this event explores the history, impact, and biases of facial recognition technologies. Historians Sharrona Pearl (Texas Christian University) and Iris Clever (University of Chicago) and LA-based artist Ken Gonzales-Day will discuss the intersections of surveillance, race, and artistic resistance, offering fresh perspectives on one of today’s most pressing issues.

On Wednesday, October 23, Tucson Jewish Museum & Holocaust Center (TJMHC) hosted an opening reception of the Allen & Marianne Langer Contemporary Human Rights Exhibit. The new exhibit is titled Witnessing Violence: Help or Harm? One key inspiration for this exhibit was artist Ken Gonzales-Day’s Erased Lynchings series which utilizes altered lynching photographs to confront the spectacle of these extrajudicial, white supremacist killings.

By Walker Mimms

If you head north on Interstate 95 from New York, you’ll find that unease in another large-scale corrective from an artist. As you approach New Haven, on the right you’ll pass “Composition in Black and Brown,” a billboard by the artist Ken Gonzales-Day collaging his photographs of 18th-century marble busts from the Yale Center for British Art, which commissioned the work.

By Mike Cummings

The billboard, which is titled “Composition in Black and Brown I” and will be on view near exit 44 through October, depicts a photographic collage by the Los Angeles-based artist Ken Gonzales-Day. It combines photos of portrait busts and other sculpture from the collections of the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) and Yale Peabody Museum, and prompts questions about the historical constructions of race and modes of representation.

By Edwin Folven

When the new Metro D Line subway station at Wilshire/Fairfax debuts in fall 2025, it will open a grand new portal for people to experience Los Angeles’ rich art and cultural institutions along Museum Row in the Miracle Mile.

Art is a key component of the transit experience and the design of Metro’s subway stations. Each station has three to five public artworks specifically reflecting the surrounding communities. At the Wilshire/Fairfax station, an artwork by Ken Gonzales-Day aims to capture the depth and diversity of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s expansive art collection and the environment in which it is displayed.

Metro Art-commissioned artist Ken Gonzales-Day and Los Angeles County Museum of Art curators Eve Schillo and Rita Gonzalez discuss the artist’s work on Tuesday, Aug. 20, from 7-8 p.m. at the museum. Gonzales-Day’s artwork “Urban Excavation: Ancestors, Avatars, Bodhisattvas, Buddhas, Casts, Copies, Deities, Figures, Funerary Objects, Gods, Guardians, Mermaids, Metaphors, Mothers, Possessions, Sages, Spirits, Symbols, and Other Objects” will be on display in the Wilshire/Fairfax subway station on the D Line Extension.

Throughout New Directions, the photographic image features as a tool to foritfy—but also unsettle—ideas about history and identity. Major themes in the exhibition examine the power of archivevs, digital image culture, the social structures of race and gender, and the landscapes as a repository for history. While some of the artists embrace photography as a documentary medium, others develop strategies to destabilize the authority of the image.

Here I will draw from several bodies of my work, including two series, Erased Lynching and Profiled, and an exhibition entitled Unseen: Our Past in a New Light, Ken Gonzales-Day and Titus Kaphar, ending with my Constellations series, to share the different ways in which my exploration of race, whiteness, and absence have informed my pracitice. 

There are nonetheless some incredibly potent moments. A gallery featuring works related to resistance is beautifully installed. There, De la Loza's powerful bodily protest images hang withing view of Ken Gonzales-Day's elegant photographs of California hang trees. (Sometimes the absence of a body can be just as poignant as its presence.)

As the curtain falls on 2023, Art Basel Miami Beach 2023 stood as a grand finale in a packed calendar of art fairs. Attracting a staggering 79,000 visitors, North America’s largest art fair encapsulated this year’s trends and transformations. Throughout the fair, exhibitors reported a revived enthusiasm among attendees, with several galleries remarking on a robust return of collectors and the palpable energy that defined this year’s edition.

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles sold Hector Dionicio Mendoza’s Coyota/e (2022) to a prominent Southern art foundation. The gallery also sold two sets of Ken Gonzales-Day’s “Erased Lynchings V” postcards to separate “major East Coast institutions.” A large-scale sculpture by Hector Dionicio Mendoza, Jalando/Pulling (2020), sold to a bicoastal collector.

Face to Face unites two complementary bodies of work by LA-based photographer Ken Gonzales-Day. Pandemic Portraits includes photographs of artists, dancers, writers, and other culture workers taken at the height of the pandemic, shedding light on moments of intimacy in the face of isolation. Profiled features images of sculptural busts and other works found in storage rooms of major US museums, including the Smithsonian and the National Portrait Gallery, raising critical questions about race, identity, and representation. The two series are linked by a 2022 portrait of Dr. Steven Pratt of the Osage Nation and an image of the 1904 bust of his great grandfather, Shonke Mon-thi^.

Ken Gonzales-Day, 58 and Scripps College’s Fletcher Jones Chair in Art, is currently balancing two spotlights, one shining from the Claremont Lewis Museum of Art and the other from The Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, where the art and photography professor is being double featured.

Earlier this month, CLMA\, unveiled “Face to Face: Ken Gonzales-Day,” which showcases two of the Silver Lake resident’s more recent projects, his “Pandemic Portraits” series which displays images of creatives during the pandemic, and “Profiled,” photographs.  Barely a mile away at the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery hangs Gonzales-Day’s second exhibit, “Queer-ish: Photography and the LGBTQ+ Imaginary.” The exhibit will continue until December 15 and is divided into four parts: touch, portraiture, queer imaginary, and acting out.

A new exhibit, “Face to Face: Ken Gonzales-Day,” presenting the photography of artist Ken Gonzales-Day, opens Friday, Oct. 6, at the Claremont Lewis Museum of Art.  Gonzales-Day, an art professor at Claremont’s Scripps College since 1995, has been exploring the history of race and its representation for more than two decades. The exhibition juxtaposes two overlapping bodies of work, “Pandemic Portraits: and “Profiled.”

 Co-curated by John G. Hampton and Lillian O’Brien-David, Conceptions of White examines ways in which whiteness and the white race have shaped the world. 

In addition, Conceptions of White includes a photograph by Los Angeles-based artist Ken Gonzales-Day. He attracted a great deal of attention with his Wonder Gaze exhibition, which highlighted a hidden legacy of lynching in California. A significant number of people of Latin American ancestry were among those who suffered these atrocities.  O’Brien-Davis says in the video that Gonzales-Day took photographs of lynching postcards and digitally removed victims’ images. In the early 20th century, people kept them as “popular souvenirs”.

Gonzales-Day's art is the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. A gnarled and withered tree set against verdant green hills and a lush and leafy one amid parched golden fields both look like paradise. The tension between what you know about these two places and what you see of them conjures an unsettling landscape filled with ghosts.

The exhibition awards considerable space to Latinx experiences. Ken Gonzales-Day's devastating Erased Lynchings (2006), part of a larger series the artist developed between 2002 and 2017, features a grid of fifteen appropriated souvenir cards from extrajudicial murders in California between 1850 and 1935, the brutalized bodies of the victims removed from the images.

"We wanted to tell different stories, something beyond the 'Cowboys and Indians.'" Explains Chaloupka. "And I think it comes across in the breadth of the artwork." Perhaps the most upsetting piece in the exhibition in Ken Gonzales-Day's confrontational "Erased Lynchings," which features 15 real-life photographs of lynching postcards, old photos that were circulated in the 19th and 20th centuries to intimidate families of color out of majority White areas.

"Many Wests" showcase the work of 48 modern and contemporary artists, who predominantly identify as Asian American, Black, Indigenous, LGBTQ+, or Latinx. The exhibition includes a wide range of artistic mediums, such as paintings, photographs, prints, sculptures, and videos. Ken Gonzales-Day digitally alters historical photographs of vigilante violence, removing the bodies of Native American, Asian American, and Latinx victims.

The American West is vast enough to contain innumerable stories. Yet for generations, American movies, books and paintings have told relatively few of those tales, almost always centered on people of European descent. Ken Gonzales-Day digitally alters photographs of vigilante violence—mostly lynchings—to remove the bodies of Native American, Asian American, and Latinx victims.

The Museum of Contemporary Art added 123 works by 68 artists to its collection in 2022, which now numbers nearly 8,000 artworks, museum officials announced Tuesday. The acquisitions reflect a diverse group of artists, including many from Los Angeles.

In his own research through numerous newspaper archive microfilm from 1849-1880, Ken Gonzales-Day has uncovered over 350 cases of lynchings of Latinos — 59 of which were in Los Angeles — by investigating incidents in the West that were previously reported as “white”.  Gonzales-Day and Beserra Núñez are part of an ongoing conversation about placing a Mexican American-Latino historical monument in Los Angeles to educate people of the history. 

What is white, as a shade, a concept, an identity? Too often, binary ideas cloud deeper investigations into the historical construction of whiteness as a race. In this group exhibition, curators Lillian O’Brien Davis and John G. Hampton explored connections between the political myth of whiteness that developed alongside the dispossession of Black and Indigenous people and the aesthetic and philosophical significance of white in art. 

A Los-Angeles based Mexican American, Ken Gonzales-Day heard echoes of the rhetoric used to justify lynching in the calls by radicalized white men for armed Americans, to patrol the Southern borders against migrants. Gonzales-Day sought to shift viewers’ attention away from the hyperbolic accusations that criminalize racial minorities to the aggression of the vigilantes. His images seek to prompt viewers to question the true threat to American communities in the past and today—racial minorities or white supremacist vigilantism? 

As a Latinx artist in a city and state where we continue to be underrepresented, I was drawn to represent at least part of my cultural heritage. Many of these objects are rarely on view in the physical world of the museum. I wanted to record them, at this time, to invite their presence in a shared space below the earth. The work is a portal, through which all may travel, from the past to future, or from darkness to light. The journey is up to them.

In 2014, through a Smithsonian Artist in Residency Fellowship, Gonzales-Day sought to photograph and address the underrepresentation of Native Americans, African Americans and Latinx in sculpture. The project resulted in the 2018 exhibition, “Unseen: Our past in a new light, Ken Gonzales-Day and Titus Kaphar,” which was presented as part of the museum’s 50th anniversary exhibition program.

But there is also plenty that explores the culture and aesthetic significance of trees — be it the literal pattern of a tree’s form or the ways in which trees function as symbols of creation (the Bodhi Tree or the Tree of Life), as well as death. Included in the exhibition is an image by Ken Gonzales-Day, a Los Angeles artist who has long tracked the history of Mexican American lynchings in the West, a history that leads him to the trees on which these murderous actions took place.

These practices parallel the Erased Lynching photographs of artist Ken Gonzales-Day. In these digitally manipulated versions of historical photographs, the bodies of lynching victims have been removed, leaving only the images of the perpetrators subject to our gaze. It is an opposite approach to that of the Emory iconoclast. Yet the redacted or defaced pictures in Bibb’s book similarly attest to a reader’s active rejection of oppression.

Another such project is artist Ken Gonzales-Day’s Erased Lynching series. Since 2000, he’s been collecting and digitally manipulating photographs of lynchings, removing the victims’ bodies from the frame. The rationale, he says on his website, is that “by erasing the victim’s body I hoped to create a visual experience that would force the viewer to focus on the crowd, and in doing so, to address the underlying racism and bias that was so foundational to many of these acts of collective violence”.

In “Another Land” at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, Ken Gonzales-Day invites viewers to face the ugliest parts of ourselves and our nation’s history: its legacy of racialized violence. This latest series of drawings is informed by Gonzales-Day’s extensive research into the history of lynching in the conquest of the Americas and are a continuation of his “Erased Lynching” series, in which he appropriates and reinvents historic lynching images and artworks.

The lynching of James Reed, in Crisfield, Maryland, on July 28, 1907, for the alleged murder of the police officer John H. Daugherty. This image was modified for The Atlantic by the artist Ken Gonzales-Day, whose technique, as showcased in his "Erased Lynchings" project, is to digitally remove the victim and rope from historical photographs of lynchings. By erasing the victims’ bodies, Gonzales-Day pushes the viewer to focus on the crowd and, by proxy, the racism and bias that were foundational to these acts of violence. 

Especially illuminating is the article devoted to the personal collection of Ken Gonzales-Day. An artist who has long engaged photography and the history of California in his work (and who currently has a show on view at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles). Gonzales-Day has spent years gathering vernacular images of Latinos in Southern California in the period that spans the 1850s to the 1950s. California seems only to exist in the U.S. public imagination after becoming a state in 1850. Gonzales-Day’s collection reveals who was here when the U.S. military rolled in.

Rodrigo Valenzuela, Ken Gonzales-Day, Michael Kindred Knight at Luis De Jesus. Three concurrent solo exhibitions. Rodrigo Valenzuela’s New Works for a Post-Worker World speaks to the elimination not only of individual laborers but of the idea itself of the workforce. In Another Land, Ken Gonzales-Day presents a new series of drawings started in 2020 as part of a commission project for the Smithsonian’s Journal of the Archives of American Art. Michael Kindred Knight’s newest body of work, Guide Meridian, represents a progression in his approach to abstraction as complex pictorial events that are developed over time. 

Ken Gonzales-Day, the Los Angeles-based visual artist best known for his Erased Lynching photographic series (2002-ongoing) and the related 2006 book, Lynching in the West: 1850-1935, has been researching and collecting Latinx photography spanning from the 1850s to the 1950s.

Los Angeles-based artist Ken Gonzales-Day discussed his ongoing series, “Erased Lynching,” Thursday at the USC Fisher Museum of Art. Invited as part of the museum’s Fall 2021 exhibition “Art and hope at the end of the Tunnel,” Gonzales-Day talked about the history of lynching’s erasure in California, particularly of Latinx people. 

Though the Fisher Museum features art of many different mediums (including amazing quilted tapestries and more abstracted collages), the exhibition excels most in its presentation of various portraits. The portraits displayed a range from Damian Elwes’ Basquiat-inspired canvas to Simon Toparovsky’s futuristic-looking cast aluminum busts and Ken Gonzales-Day’s collection of “Pandemic Portraits” depicting fellow artists, models and friends.

Ken Gonzales-Day is among the artists included in “Photo Flux: Unshuttering LA” at the J. Paul Getty Museum. The exhibition opens when Getty Center re-opens on May 25, and will be on view through October 10. “Photo Flux” features pictures by 35 Los Angeles-based artists who challenge ideals related to beauty, representation, cultural capital and objectivity. It was curated by jill moniz.

On view now in the Taschen Family Gallery, Transformations: Living Room -> Flea Market -> Museum -> Art examines how a political watershed moment, the fall of the Berlin Wall, initiated a radical change in the perception of art and culture. The show presents the metamorphosis of objects from everyday life through discarded flea market items to museum pieces, where they finally become sources of artistic inspiration. Transformations includes materials from the Getty Conservation Institute as well as works by contemporary artists Chelle Barbour, Ken Gonzales-Day, Farrah Karapetian, Richtje Reinsma, Daphne Rosenthal, Jennifer Vanderpool, and Bari Ziperstein. 

In his “Profiled” project, artist and art historian Gonzales-Day has mined the collections of established museums such as J. Paul Getty and the Smithsonian, among others, photographing portrait busts exploring Western assumptions about beauty and human value through the material legacies of slavery, colonialism and white privilege.

And at Playwrights Horizons in Midtown, the Mexican-American artist Ken Gonzales-Day is placing photographs of sculptures of human figures in display cases, encouraging viewers to reckon with definitions of beauty and race. Those displays are part of rotating public art series organized by the artist, activist, and writer Avram Finkelstein and the set and costume designer David Zinn. 

In the Profiled series, Gonzales-Day recontextualized sculptures by putting them in conversation only with other sculptures- and the fraught spaces between them. Not dissimilar to theater, his Profiled works tell complex, socially layered stories by simply placing human figures together across empty space. Gonzales-Day describes, "I wanted to take these existing objects and give them a voice, a chance to be in dialogue with us and with each other across time. They're from different periods, they're from different places, some are identified, some are unidentified, which speaks to questions of who has a voice and who is denied a voice, who is represented and who is denied representation.

Pacific Standard Time will include dozens of simultaneous exhibitions and programs focused on the intertwined histories of art and science, past and present, that together address some of the most complex challenges of the 21st century—from climate change and environmental racism to the current pandemic and artificial intelligence—and the creative solutions these problems demand.

Ken Gonzales-Day is a Los Angeles-based artist whose interdisciplinary practice considers the historical construction of race and the limits of representational systems ranging from lynching photographs to museum displays. He is a professor of art at Scripps College in Claremont, CA where he has taught since 1995. Gonzales-Day’s Erased Lynching series features photos of lynching postcards where he removes, or 'erases,' the victims in order to focus on the white crowds gathered to witness the murders.

Ken Gonzales-Day is a Los Angeles-based artist whose interdisciplinary practice considers the historical construction of race and the limits of representational systems ranging from lynching photographs to museum displays. Gonzales-Day received a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, an MFA from the University of Colifornia, Irvine and a MA from Hunter College in New York. He is a professor of art at Scripps College in Claremont,CA where he has taught since 1995. In 2017 he was awareded a Guggenheim fellowship in photography. 

Virtual Exhibition Openings at the Wende Museum. A virtual opening to celebrate the launch of two new exhibitions: Transformations: Living Room -> Flea Market -> Museum -> Art and See Thy Neighbor: Stern Photographers Thomas Hoepker and Harald Schmitt in the GDR, presented via the 3-D platform Matterport. The program will feature a panel discussion with Transformations artists including Ken Gonzales Day.

“The Democracy Project: 2020” manifests the great, besieged “project of Democracy” as an online exhibition for Artillery’s September/October issue, featuring recent work by a diverse selection of the West Coast’s most compelling artists. Whether approaching the theme ironically, or with reverence (or a bit of both), the artists below are chosen for their political engagement, provocative content, and significant contributions to the diversity of the art world. ARTISTS: Kim Abeles, Sama Alshaibi, Aaron Coleman, Eileen Cowin, Asad Faulwell, Corey Grayhorse, Mark Steven Greenfield, Salim Green, Ken Gonzales-Day, Alexander Kritselis, Ann Le, Alejandro Macias, Renée Petropoulos, Mike Reesé, Miles Regis, Julio M. Romero, Stephanie Syjuco, Meital Yaniv.

Former Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, Ken Gonzales-Day, thinks about who is and who is not represented in the National Portrait Gallery and in the Smithsonian collection as a whole, while researching in the institution’s massive digital archive.To commemorate MHz Foundation’s collaboration with the Smithsonian Open Access initiative, we asked artist Shana Lutker, one of MHz Curationist’s Advising Editors, to introduce the new Smithsonian Open Access collections to artists and talk with them about what they found. 

The image above is from Ken Gonzales-Day’s Erased Lynchings series, which documents the historic lynchings of Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and Asian American individuals across California. The victims in these images have been removed by the artist. The horrific nature of these crimes often makes it difficult to see the apparatus that surrounds the spectacle of the dead body on display. By removing the victim, Gonzales-Day allows us to see what is hiding in plain sight: the white audience gathered for this act of racial terror. The image is a stark reminder of the invisibility of white identity. Whiteness permeates through western society as thoroughly as the air that we all should have the right to breathe. The people in this particular image are not all actively tying a noose, but their mere presence and inaction creates an atmosphere within which such violence is normalized and perpetuated.

Gonzales-Day’s powerful and nuanced investigations of intersectionality and racial violence stem from an almost-encyclopedic knowledge of art history and a desire to rewrite a more inclusive past and advocate for a more equitable present. The work has a gravitas that is often accentuated by a poetic manipulation of light and form, and exhibits Gonzales-Day’s dexterity in working in a range of modes from performance and installation to projects that are more documentary in nature. What is perhaps most profound about his work is that he invites inquiry and connections, but not without effort from his audience; the more open the viewer, the more the work reveals.

Over Independence Day Weekend, 80 artists [including Ken Gonzales-Day and Zackary Drucker] asked Americans to look up at the skies. Throughout July 3 and 4, messages related to immigration were written at 10,000 feet by World War II military planes, sky-typed over 80 sites related to the country's network of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities, immigration courts, and the southern border. The idea was to bring attention to these facilities, which may not be familiar to many Americans.

The purpose of the temporary works was to raise awareness about social injustice rampant in the US’s immigration system and where these injustices are carried out. Over the weekend, XMAP: In Plain Sight uplifted the children and adults who have suffered from inhuman living conditions, the separation of detained families, violence, and, in some cases, death at the hands of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE.

A group of 80 artists from around the country have teamed up to produce skytyped messages that will appear over immigrant detention camps around the United States, as well as other sites related to internment and incarceration. Among the participating artists of “In Plain Sight” are Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors; graphic designer Emory Douglas, once the minister of culture for the Black Panther Party; and a range of cultural practitioners, including Ken Gonzales-Day, Harry Gamboa Jr., Mary Kelly...

Two fleets of five skytyping planes each are set for takeoff across the country this Independence Day weekend armed with calls for the abolition of the immigrant detention in the United States as part of the project “In Plain Sight.” (Developed from older skywriting technology, skytyping planes inject oil into their exhaust systems to produce a white smoke that is released into the sky by a computer-controlled system to produce precise letter-writing.) Phrases like “Care Not Cages,” “Unseen Mothers” and “Nosotras Te Vemos (We See You)” will momentarily hover above 80 locations — including detention facilities, immigration courts, prisons, borders and historic sites like Ellis Island — before dissipating into the atmosphere.

Artist Ken Gonzales-Day has been widely recognized for the “Erased Lynching” series, which include lynching postcard photos that effectively “erased’ the victims of lynching and focused on the white crowds gathered to witness the murders. Gonzales-Day argues that the erasure of the lynching victim “allows the viewer to see, for the first time, the social dynamics of the lynching itself.” The photos, absent of the images of victims, “helped us to recognise the dynamics of whiteness within the complex history of racialised violence in America,”

Searching for California’s Hang Trees, grew out of the research artist Ken Gonzales-Daywas doing for his book Lynching in the West: 1850-1935, published by Duke University Press in 2006. In it, Gonzales-Day sets out to assemble the most complete record of lynching in California that had yet been published. What his research uncovered, was that contrary to popular belief, African Americans were not the only targets of lynching in California and the west. In fact, Gonzales-Day was also able to document the lynching of Latinos, Native Americans, and Chinese immigrants, at least in part due to their racial identity. In doing so, Gonzales-Day has revealed a history of violence against immigrants in the west that still goes on today, with mass incarceration and family separation taking place at our borders.

“Citizenship acknowledges the political power of images,” [curator Georgia Erger] said, “and the power that comes from the fact that photos, and graphics and ultimately video and film can be so widely and easily disseminated, and therefore, much more accessible.” The works of art include 20th-century photographs by Leonard Freed, a series of etchings by Francisco de Goya, and engravings by William Hogarth, along with “Erased Lynchings,” which Mr. Gonzales-Day produced from 2006 to 2019. Based on actual postcards, and his visits to where lynchings took place, Mr. Gonzales-Day’s work shows crowds gathered at places across America, such as California and Montana, to watch the hangings.

Drawing its title from my Pulitzer Prize-nominated book of the same name, Lynchings in the West: 1850-1935, this series considers the transracial nature of lynching in California, from statehood to the last recorded lynchings in 1935, as well as other western states and territories outside the historically better-known Southern black lynching areas. Given the broad number of people touched by this history (Asians, Anglos, Blacks and American Indians), many will be suprised to learn that Latinos (Mexican, Mexican- American, and persons of Latin American descent) were statistically more likely to die of lynching than those of African, Asian or European descent. 

While researching Latino portraiture from the 1800s, the photographer Ken Gonzales-Day found an image of a young Latino man. "Last man hanged in Los Angeles," was written on the back. When he read that phrase, Gonzales-Day came to the conclusion that he didn't have a clear understanding of California history. To make sense of his discovery, he began to work on the series of photographs that's now known as "Erased Lynching" (2006). The Santa Clara University Art Department's exhibit "Ken Gonzales-Day" features several of his photographs from the collection.

Santa Clara University (SCU), a flag bearer in an ongoing crusade for social justice, regularly raises awareness of social issues through the arts. A free exhibition of 25 Erased Lynching and California Hang Tree photos by Los Angeles-based artist Ken Gonzales-Day is on view through Jan. 24 in the Gallery of the Art and Art History building.

“Ken Gonzales-Day is an artist who makes work as an act of compassion,” said exhibition curator Renee Billingslea, a senior lecturer in the Department of Art and Art History.

Ken Gonzalez-Day’s images from the series Erased Lynchings sees the artist digitally remove the dead hanging body of a nameless murdered person of colour, in order to avoid re-victimising the individual. This places our attention on the real guilty subjects, those white people who take it upon themselves extrajudicially to police black and brown bodies. The black body is here removed from the gaze of white eyes, a form of sight which undergirds the social dominance of whiteness. Gonzales-Day writes: “The work asks viewers to consider the crowd, the spectacle, the role of the photographer, and even the impact of flash photography, and their various contributions to our understanding of racialized violence in this nation.”

The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery announces the acquisition of a photograph of the bust of Shonke Mon thi^, who was a prominent warrior and spiritual leader of the Osage people and hereditary Chief of the Pa tso li^ Big Hill Band at the turn of the 20th century. This work by Latino artist Ken Gonzales-Day was first displayed by the Portrait Gallery in UnSeen: Our Past in a New Light, Ken Gonzales-Day and Titus Kaphar, which was presented as part of the museum’s 50th anniversary exhibition program.

Ken Gonzales-Day is a historian, and the author of the book Lynching in California. He included the Callahan lynching story in his book as an unconfirmed case. And he says that people don’t often realize how common racist violence was in the history of the Western US. “I wanted to write a book to clearly demonstrate racialized violence was active in California, and that it wasn’t just some sort of race-neutral wild-west frontier sort of activity, which is what many people thought at the time,” he says.

The anchor fair of the week promises to be just as chock-full of programming as in previous years. There are also some new additions, including the Diálogos section, which will show works by Latinx and Latin American artists like Ana Mendieta, Ken Gonzales-Day, and Marta Chilindron; and the Frieze sculpture prize, a new commission made this year by up-and-coming artist Lauren Halsey.

Another themed section of the fair turns a spotlight on contemporary and modern Latin artists. Taking cue from the legendary performance artist Ana Mendieta, Diálagos presents works from artists whose practice includes a bold sense of color, pageantry and performance, alongside a highly politicized examination of identity. Ken Gonzales-Day explores, through various media, the material legacies of identity-based oppressions, casting an unflinching eye over histories of slavery, colonialism, gender-normativity and other systemic evils.

El Museo del Barrio, the NYC museum dedicated to Latinx, Caribbean, and Latin American culture turns 50 years old this year. Frieze New York, the biggest week of the year for art in New York, kicks off on Thursday, and it won't overlook the milestone of the institution, which was founded in 1969, when Latino artists were largely overlooked by mainstream museums.

As the partial shutdown of the federal government enters its second full week, all Smithsonian museums and many other agencies in D.C. and beyond have shuttered for lack of funds, or are getting ready to close for an indefinite period...Other major shows that are, for now, closed to the public include a long-anticipated Bill Traylor retrospective at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, a Charline von Heyl survey at the Hirshhorn, and a Ken Gonzales-Day and Titus Kaphar two-person affair, set to finish its run on Sunday at the National Portrait Gallery.

A panel of nationally recognized curators, local arts professionals and community members from the Purple Line Extension Section 1 area has selected artists to create site-specific, integrated artworks for Wilshire/La Brea, Wilshire/Fairfax and Wilshire/La Cienega Stations.  The diverse range of accomplished artists includes: Ken Gonzales-Day, Todd Gray, Karl Haendel, Soo Kim, Eamon Ore-Giron, Fran Siegel, Susan Silton, and Mark Dean Veca.

It brought together a similar intergenerational mix of racially diverse artists who identify widely across the gender spectrum, though their prompt was slightly different, creating responses to recontextualize the Segal rather than replace it outright. The results varied from Ken Gonzales-Day’s proposal to scatter sculptural corpses around the park to Carrie Moyer’s and Sheila Pepe’s photo-play satire of today’s middle-class lesbian life.

Curator of painting and sculpture & Latino art and history at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Taína Caragol, said: “I co-curated UnSeen: Our Past in a New Light, Ken Gonzales-Day and Titus Kaphar with Dr. Asma Naeem, as part of the National Portrait Gallery’s 50th anniversary program..."

Sometimes what’s absent from a museum says more about history than what’s included. Two contemporary artists—Titus Kaphar, who is African-American, and Ken Gonzales-Day, who is Mexican-American—have spent their careers addressing this issue. In the National Portrait Gallery’s newest exhibition, Unseen: Our Past in a New Light, the two artists take contrasting approaches—and work in two different mediums—to tell the stories of the missing and overlooked. The museum’s director Kim Sajet says Unseen hopefully will act as a town square. 

Los Angeles- based, Gonzales-Day mines museum archives and photographs sculptural objects most of them rarely, if ever, displayed publicly. His work deconstructs racial hierarchies, considers beauty ideals, and evaluates how artists have treated and interpreted white bodies and bodies of color. He embarked on this aspect of his practice in 2008 during a residency at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. 

The linchpin of the show is a fictional text Gonzales-Day created from 1993 to 1996 but revisited in 2017. It traces the life of Ramoncita, a two-spirit person, from her early life as a naive indentured servant, all the way to old age as a self-actualized artist. The story is set during the Mexican-American War and involves one other central character, Nepomuceno, a New Mexican who fights on the Mexican side and is forced to secret himself home after the U.S. victory. The book is presented as an historical artifact, with a selection of pages available for reading in the form of framed photographs filling an entire wall of the back room. Many images in the gallery’s front were originally made as illustrations for the book, in which they also appear.

Ending DACA will be Donald Trump’s Trail of Tears when he forces American children who lack documentation to a country they may not remember, and more importantly it breaks up families. Breaking up of families was a central component of slavery because it diminished individuals and communities and kept people of color from being seen, or seeing themselves, as equal to whites.

Ken Gonzales-Day's exhibit Bone-Grass Boy: The Secret Banks of the Conejos River at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles in Culver City (through Oct. 28) is the product of such excavations. Tracing his family back to 16th-century New Mexico, the Los Angeles artist learns about his complicated genealogy and writes his family history as if it were a novel in which his ancestors are the characters. The exhibit, which runs as a complementary show to PST, features photographs of the artist posing as each character, both male and female. Most prominently, he performs the role of Ramoncita, a “two-spirited” Zuni woman of New Mexico wearing Spanish colonial garb.

The singularly remarkable thing about Ken Gonzales-Day’s re-creation of his breakthrough 1993-96 photographic project, Bone-Grass Boy: The Secret Banks of the Conejos River is the infinitely expansive temporal envelope it seems to occupy. This is more than partially by design in that it appropriates literary tropes and motives of 19th century frontier novels to serve a much larger conceptual and cultural conversation. That such a conversation might be no less relevant and possibly even more urgent today, though, could scarcely have been anticipated when the work was being made. Now, against a backdrop of seismic human migration and planetary change, it seems as if the project could have been made 60 years ago or just yesterday.

And in a photomural by the Los Angeles artist Ken Gonzalez-Day, the body is conspicuous through its absence. The mural is based on one of many photographs the artist has tracked down of lynchings of Latinos, Native Americans and Chinese immigrant men in California in the early 20th century. In the nocturnal picture used here, men milling around a tree look upward, but the object of their attention is missing. The artist has erased the form of the hanged victim, leaving dark, empty space.

History is written by the victors, or actually by those in power. Since the civil rights movement in the 1960s, culturally specific museums, such as the Leslie-Lohman Museum, El Museo, and The Studio Museum in Harlem, have been reclaiming scholarship and writing history from multiple perspectives, making for a more nuanced and complex interpretation of US history. Those interested in the future of Confederate symbols (flags, monuments, sites) and how to properly provide interpretations that are nuanced and multifaceted, can take a page from the book of culturally specific museums.

Artist and photographer Ken Gonzales-Day explores the history of racial violence in America and a survey of his work, Shadowlands, which opens today and runs through April 16 at the Minnesota Museum of American Art, investigates how this history informs our current reality. Among the works is Gonzales-Day's series Erased Lynchings, a set of digitally altered 19th and 20th century lynching postcards, where hanged figures of various races have been removed by the artist, allowing the remaining participants to take focus.

For more than a decade, Ken Gonzales-Day has been exploring the history of racialized violence in America, creating several bodies of work that are brought together for the first time in this exhibition. Cumulatively, his work is a powerful and complex statement that challenges what we thought we knew about this country’s great dilemma. The Los Angeles–based artist has extensively researched lynchings in California, where Mexican Americans and Asian Americans were widely targeted during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 

In 2001, Ken Gonzales-Day set out to write a book on Latino portraiture in 19th- and 20th- century California; his research led to his discovery of dozens of images and written records of lynching, and, ultimately, to his 2006 book Lynching in the West, 1850-1935. On view through April 16 at the Minnesota Museum of American Art, Shadowlands, which grew out of this publication, comprises his own photographs, archival images, books, and ephemera. All of this material, along with his photographs about this country’s recent racial violence, deftly compresses history and raises questions about our historic construction of race.

Text beneath the photo instructs the viewer, “Do not look at the Negro,” directing one’s gaze instead to “the seven WHITE children who gaze at this gruesome spectacle.” The caption calls to mind artist Ken Gonzales-Day’s project “Erased Lynching,” which removes the bodies of lynching victims—many of whom were Mexican-American—from lynching photos, focusing the viewer’s attention instead on the white perpetrators and spectators. Rather than record the suffering of the victim, the focus on the spectators highlights the pathologies of whiteness.

In “Score Settling,” Teresa Margolles made jewelry from glass shattered in shooting incidents. In the labels, instead of describing the pieces, she describes the crime. Another artist, Ken Gonzales-Day, edited images of lynchings and removed the victims so the focus can lie squarely on the perpetrators. The exhibit is loosely organized around four themes. In “Objects and Absences,” artists use photographs and found objects to create connections to the missing.

Among the most powerful works in the exhibition, for me, are a group of photos by Ken Gonzales-Day. He has taken archival photographs of lynchings and photoshopped out the victim so that we focus on the perpetrators of these heinous acts. These works have had a profound impact on me, and have made me look inward and ask myself the very uncomfortable questions, ‘When have I not spoken up? When have I been a bystander to injustice?'

Ken Gonzales-Day’s manipulated archival photographs of Western lynching victims and the crowds that witnessed and committed their mob-mad murders allude to these lost lives by erasing the victims and their ropes from his images. The works are subversive – titles like This is What He Got or Five in a row cue viewers to search for the victims/subjects in the images and to imagine them in the spaces they once occupied. The voyeuristic point of view creates a kind of complicity that aligns the viewer with the pictured mob rather than with the victims, with whom most might seek to empathize. There is a kind of moral presence in the corporeal absences in Gonzales-Day’s images that picture atrocities, whether we can see them or not.

How do photographers qualify for inclusion? Some, like Ken Gonzales-Day, Mario Ybarra Jr., and Lyle Ashton Harris, do so by using photographs as one piece in a larger project involving social commentary and self-dramatization. Gonzales-Day’s untitled photograph of two antique busts from the Getty collection riffs brilliantly on the double meaning of the word “profile,” which in this instance implies both the angle from which these faces are seen and the degree to which they fit with the viewer’s expectations regarding facial features and racial identity.

The works in the exhibit “ask similar questions about the impact of history on beauty,” she says. “What do we do with the beautiful trees that Ken Gonzales-Day photographs, but which we later come to find out are trees on which men were once lynched? Is there an ethics of seeing that refuses to shut out this historical legacy?”
 

The "Graying of Whiteness" section was introduced by Ken Gonzales-Day, now professor of art at Scripps College, Claremont, California. Since then he completed a book on the history of lynching in California, "Searching for California Hang Trees," and has had numerous solo exhibitions, most recently at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. My essay from the book follows below. Image captions have been retained from the original text. But, a decade later, many of the artists have changed galleries, obtained other ones, or some have gone out of business.

Next, we stopped at the Luis de Jesus Gallery to meet with L.A. artist Ken Gonzales-Day and see his new exhibition of photographs, including the well-known image of two male faces seen in profile. These are bronze portraits from the Getty’s collection, one depicting a white male and the other a black man, staring at one another across a wide divide. Looking at Gonzales-Day’s photographs, your first impression is of the elegant beauty of the museum objects he has chosen as his subjects. But the cool surfaces of these photos are always impregnated with palpable racial, ethnic and cultural tensions.

In “Profiled,” Gonzales-Day sorted through busts from storage rooms of art and history museums from Europe, the Americas and Asia in search of different depictions of race. He collected Western European works from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries depicting the perceived “scientific” images of racial difference. The seemingly random group of individuals shown unknowingly helped create the racial stereotypes they happened to embody. When paired together we can easily recognize one sculpture as Asian, another as Native American, regardless of their marbled, identical skin tones. In the art history canon we see categorization and hierarchy emerge, using bodies as if they were variables.

The American tradition of lynching transcended the white-black milieu of the Deep South. Two social historians, William Carrigan and Clive Webb, have made a strong documentary case that the "lynching rate" for Mexican-Americans was comparable to that for African Americans.3 California led the way in anti-Mexican and anti-Chinese vigilantism. According to legend, Joaquín Murrieta – one of the great figures in Gold Rush and Chicano history – chose his second career in banditry in response to the hanging of his half brother. 

Artist Ken Gonzales-Day was researching early photographic images of Latinos in California when he came across a portrait that propelled his work in a whole new direction. "I turned it over, and on the back somebody had written, 'Last man hanged in California,'" he recalled, "And at that point I realized I didn't know what that meant. Did that mean legally executed? Did that mean vigilante committee? Did that mean lynch mob?" There were no books on the subject, so Gonzales-Day began combing through archives throughout the state. He found over 350 documented cases of lynchings in California. But unlike their Southern, African American counterparts, the victims of this violence were largely Latino. What's more, California lynchings had been consistently neglected by historians and scholars.

Ken Gonzales-Day uses photographs to picture sites of secrecy and hidden history. Light-jet prints mounted on aluminum panels yield a stately, almost ceremonial presence. In his Conceptually oriented pictures, prominent blank space often functions as a visual signal that something is missing -- something that the subtly exalted photograph may or may not be able to identify, but that looms large nonetheless.

In the decades after gold was discovered in California, lynch mobs hanged more than 300 people- frontier justice delivered by vigilantes. That part of the state's history had faded until Scripps College art professor and photographer Ken Gonzales- Day found a picture one day. That led to another photograph and another, and now to an exhibit at the Vincent Price Museum of Art in Monterey Park. 

Ken Gonzalez Day's large ink-jet prints put photographs of figure and portrait sculptures by artists and anthropologists in confrontation and conversation -- a colonial American woman and a classical Venus, for example, opposite Japanese and Eskimo women. Similarities and differences are thrown into high relief, but it's the blank chasm between them (in this case, between cultural conceptions of East and West) that looms largest.

Gonzales-Day anticipates this response with a large diagram: a portrait of his own head inside a cruel-looking cranial measuring device. Of course reducing entire populations of people to representative archetypes is racist and dehumanizing — this we know. But what emerges from these dual portraits is something more tender and strange. Perhaps it’s the veiled eroticism of the guys in fuzzy chaps on the other side of the room, or a smaller selection of images of classical statuary defaced with lewd graffiti, but the impassive sculptural pairs begin to look oddly like couples, gazing at each other across boundaries of geography, time and ignorance.

Historical documentation can be phantom fodder, as well. Ken Gonzales-Day takes familiar lynching images and re-photographs them, erasing bodies hanging from trees and telephone poles to create eerie voids within the pictures. W.H. Horne’s grainy photo from 1916 of U.S. General John J. Pershing’s troops “Executing Bandits in Mexico” from Pancho Villa’s ranks—that text is handwritten on the vintage print—revises the photo, removing the “bandit.”

 The Wonder Gaze uses photographs to conduct and promote an inquiry into the structural conditions of lynching both as a phenomenon situated in history and as a phenomenon living through history, encompassing, though not condoning, the gamut of lynching’s presentational and representational conditions. As Gonzales-Day shows us, photography (as a technology and as an episteme) is and was integral to lynching’s structural conditions, and for this reason there is no better apparatus for staging this archaeology than photography itself.

Combining an art project with historical analysis, the practice of Ken Gonzalez-Day makes an invaluable contribution to understanding how interdisciplinary methods should be applied in art exhibits. Several of his recent art series have emerged from his research into the visual history of the lynching of Mexican and Mexican American men in California. This epic project started when the artist began looking for percentages and statistics to support an art project, and found a history under erasure. 

So the walls, historical and institutional, come tumbling down. And, too, the wall itself, site of Mexican high modernism, high/low art, border politics and gang throw-downs, is revised by several artists, most notably in the small interior hall supporting Ken Gonzales-Day’s lynching erasure works. Two large erasure images, the soft-hatted heads of a crowd of white folks milling around a conspicuously empty tree, have been placed along two temporary gallery walls. One wall is covered by a large blue/black print, the stasis of the site and the frozen, bruised moment underscored by the constricted palette. The mirror-image on the other wall is printed on mirror-paper. Gonzales-Day’s lynching erasure project surgically extracts the fulcrum-point of the image that the spectacle is supposed to mediate.

“Phantom Sightings” takes its name from a quote by artist Gamboa Jr., equating Chicanos in Los Angeles to a “phantom culture.” One can see the theme in photo works by Ken Gonzales-Day, who has taken old images of lynchings and erased the victim in each of them. Presented in a gallery room with a reflective wall, it’s an eerie look at turn-of-the-century racial violence that implicates the viewer as well.

In a project that recalls Louise Lawler’s ongoing investigation of art objects as fetishes and commodities, Gonzales-Day photographs statuary in the storerooms of European and American museums. His interest in representations of race, gender, and class results in a number of pointed juxtapositions of white, black, and ethnic subjects that are obvious but effective. In one image, an American Indian bronze in a loincloth gestures aggressively toward a naked white-marble youth who looks back seductively. Other work here is subtler and more ambiguous, picturing the random jumble of institutional storage spaces as a mass of types and archetypes forced into peaceful coexistence.