“One of the year’s best art shows”
— Los Angeles Times
“Gonzales-Day, through applying deft erasures, vivifies the wild and wicked record”
— Christopher Knight, Art Critic
About the Exhibition:
Ken Gonzales-Day: History’s “Nevermade” is the first mid-career survey of the work of Ken Gonzales-Day, bringing together more than 100 works spanning over three decades. Through photography, drawing, painting, and film, Gonzales-Day examines race, identity, historical memory, and the role of visual culture in shaping understandings of American history.
The exhibition’s title centers on Gonzales-Day’s concept of the “nevermade,” a term he coined to describe historical documents or visual narratives that omit or misrepresent the people and events they depict. Referencing Marcel Duchamp’s idea of the “readymade,” Gonzales-Day reworks archival imagery and visual conventions to question how history is constructed, who is represented, and whose stories are left out.
Bringing Gonzales-Day’s major series into dialogue, the exhibition traces the political and historical concerns that connect his practice. Featuring staged portraits, altered historical imagery, and investigations of museum and archival collections, the survey highlights the artist’s ongoing engagement with representation, institutional histories, and the construction of public memory.
To see the Curatorial Exhibitions Prospectus click here . Read the Exhibition Narrative here. Click here to see the exhibition checklist.
You can email Curatorial Assistance directly here.
Or learn more about the initial exhibition at USC Fisher Museum of Art visit here.
Catalogue: History’s “Nevermade”
Edited by Amelia Jones (Intellect/University of Chicago Press, USD 49.95 | 352 pages)
This book, which accompanies an exhibition by the same name (Aug 18, 2025 – Mar 14, 2026), addresses the life work of Ken Gonzales-Day, a Los Angeles based artist, scholar, teacher, and curator who explores race and place in his photographic and filmic works, drawings, and paintings as well as through his research. He achieves this through a fundamental focus on the body—as intersectionally identified, place-making, empowered, or occluded—which he centralizes while (in some cases) literally erasing it. When we engage with his work, we engage his body with our bodies; we experience or own situatedness, our intersectionality as we position ourselves and are positioned in social space, always in relations of power.
Ken Gonzales-Day: History’s “Nevermade” puts the artist’s major series of art works in context, showing the deep political, aesthetic, and theoretical concerns through which he animates his practice and pointing to larger political issues in relation to which each series can be understood. The book is organized in a roughly chronological and thematic structure according to the major series of his work, all of which overlap and interrelate. The sections are: Finding a Path (Early Work), Rethinking History (Family), Rethinking History (Archives), Collecting Race (Museums), Forging Community (Publics), Imaging Bodies (Portraits), Redrawing Boundaries (Land).
Authors include: Bethany Montagano, Amelia Jones, Ken Gonzales-Day, Nadia Estrada and Yumu Huo (with Amelia Jones), Ren Heintz, Cyrielle Lévêque, Mary K. Coffe, Jason Hill, Tatiana Flores, Ana Briz, Nadia Estrada, Taína Caragol, Cecilia Fajardo-Hill w/ Amelia Jones, Ken Gonzales-Day w/ Steve Pratt.