| KEN GONZALES-DAY Erased Lynchings III, 2019 Erased Lynching Series, 2002-present Edition 4 of 6 Archival inkjet on rag paper mounted on cardstock 15 plates; 6 x 4.5 in (15.2 x 11.4 cm) KGD10466.4 Acquired by the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD
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| The Erased Lynchings series began as an artistic response to the realization that racially motivated lynching and vigilantism had been underrepresented and mis-represented in a number of historical texts. The project sought to highlight the then, little known fact that race was a contributing factor in California’s own history of lynching and vigilantism. In fact, if historical lynchings of African Americans, Chinese, Latinos, and Native Americans were grouped together, they outnumber white on white vigilantism by nearly two to one, and reveal that race is undeniably a contributing reason for violence. The imagery in the initial series derived from appropriated lynching postcards and other archival source materials from which Gonzales-Day meticulously removed victims and ropes. This conceptual gesture redirects the viewer’s attention away from the lifeless body of the victim and towards the mechanisms of lynching and spectacle, the formal aspects of lynching photography, including the role of the photographer and the impact of flash photography, and finally towards the crowd, a document of active and passive participants in each lynching. |