About

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 educational museum displays. His widely exhibited Erased Lynching series (ongoing), along with the publication of Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 (Duke University Press, 2006) transformed the understanding of racialized violence in the United States and raised awareness of the lynching of Latinos, Native Americans, Asians, and African-Americans in California, locating these collective acts of violence within the larger history of anti-immigration, white supremacy, and racial terror lynchings.

Works from the Profiled Series and the award winning PAC Prize publication Profiled (LACMA, 2011) have been exhibited internationally and grew out of his research into the history of educational displays on race, by drawing on the collections of over forty museums including, L'Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, the Field Museum in Chicago, the Getty Museum and LACMA in LA, the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, and Washington D.C., the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery (NPG), and the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), among others.

Gonzales-Day received his MFA in art from UC Irvine; his MA in art history from Hunter College, C.U.N.Y.; and was a Van Leer Fellow at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program (ISP). Other fellowships include: the Getty Research Institute (GRI), The Smithsonian SAAM fellowship in American Art, and the Smithsonian Artist Fellowship (SARF); He was a Senior Fellow at The Terra Foundation in Giverny, France; The Rockefeller Foundation Center in Bellagio, Italy, and  Gonzales-Day has received fellowships and awards from Art Matters, The Avery Foundation, California Community Foundation, Creative Capital,  L.A.s' COLA Award,  and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography. His work is in the permanent collection of The Getty; LACMA; MOCA; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Art Institute of Chicago; MoMA, NYC;  Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery; Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the National Gallery of Art, among others.

Gonzales-Day met his partner and husband Gary Wolf in 1989. Mr. Wolf had a long career in the hospitality field working at a number of storied properties with Aimbridge Hospitality, Hyatt, The Peninsula Group, and the Westin Bonaventure Hotel.

Gonzales-Day holds the Fletcher Jones Endowed Chair in Art at Scripps College and his work is represented by Luis De Jesus Los Angeles gallery. He is a serving member of the Board of Directors at The Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts and at L.A.C.E. (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) in Los Angeles.

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Gonzales-Day received a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, an MFA from the University of California Irvine, MA from Hunter College in NYC. He was a Van Lier Fellow in the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program and his work has been widely exhibited: including The J. Paul Getty Museum; LACMA; MOCA LA; Luis De Jesus Los Angeles; The Eastman Museum, Rochester; The Tamayo Museum, Mexico City; The Palais de Tokyo, Paris; The New Museum, CUE Art Foundation, The Kitchen, Jack Shainmann Gallery, and El Museo, NYC; The Generali Foundation in Vienna; and Thomas Dane Gallery in London, among others.

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