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 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 and helped to ground anti-immigration and collective acts of violence within the larger discussion of racial formation, policing, and racial justice movements.

Works from the Profiled Series have been exhibited internationally and grew out of research into the history of racial depiction found in historic expositions and educational museum displays from the Field Museum in Chicago, The Trocadero Museum in Paris, and the 1915-1916 California-Panama Exposition in San Diego, to name a few.

Gonzales-Day has received awards from the California Community Foundation, COLA, Creative Capital, Avery, and Art Matters. Fellowships include, The Rockefeller foundation in Bellagio, Italy; The Terra Foundation in Giverny; The Getty GRI; Smithsonian SARF and SAAM fellowships; and he received a Guggenheim in Photography in 2017. Gonzales-Day holds the Fletcher Jones Chair in Art at Scripps College and is represented by Luis De Jesus Los Angeles and serves on the Board of Directors for L.A.C.E., Los Angeles  and on the Advisory Board for the Archives of American Art Journal.

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

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(Photo by: Wally Skalij)