Curated by Amelia Jones, Robert Day Professor and Vice Dean of Faculty and Research at the USC Roski School of Art & Design, Ken Gonzales-Day: History’s “Nevermade” is the first mid-career survey of the Los Angeles–based artist, scholar, and educator. Spanning more than 30 years and featuring over 100 works, the exhibition brings together Gonzales-Day’s photographs, drawings, paintings, video, and research to explore cultural memory, race, and place in the United States.
Gonzales-Day coined the term “nevermade” to describe imagined historical documents—works that challenge who writes history, what is included, and what is left out. The exhibition traces his career through seven thematic sections: from early drawings and student works, to investigations of lynching in the American West, to deconstructions of racial bias in museum collections, collaborative portraits responding to moments of crisis, public artworks, and recent series reexamining colonial-era landscapes and archives.
Shown: Ken Gonzales-Day, The Wonder Gaze (St. James Park), “Erased Lynching” series, 2006
Major series on view include Erased Lynching, Searching for California Hang Trees, The Bone Grass Boy, Profiled, Pandemic Portraits, Another Land, and Decolonial Drawings. Collectively, they reveal Gonzales-Day’s deep political, historical, and theoretical concerns, offering profound insights into America’s past and present. Link to USC Fisher Museum site here.
Read Christopher Knight’s review in The Los Angeles Times here.
Jody Zellen’s review in whatsonlosangeles.com here.
Review in ArtAfrica.
Review in Annenberg Media.
Catalogue:
Through visualizing, absence and erasure, artist Ken Gonzales-Day reveals the deeply political act of seeing, forcing us to reconsider the histories we inherit. Gonzales-Day’s work confronts the role of the visual in conveying history or in history’s absences, including those bodies and spaces deliberately erased, forgotten or never acknowledged. As illustrated and discussed in Ken Gonzales-Day: History’s “Nevermade”, his photography, films, drawings and paintings interrogate race and power, questioning how bodies are seen, rendered or made invisible. His art moves between presence and absence, compelling viewers to confront their own position in relation to systems of oppression and representation. Accompanying the exhibition of the same name, this is the first comprehensive study of Gonzales-Day’s practice.
This volume, accompanying the exhibition of the same name, offers the first comprehensive study of Gonzales-Day’s practice. Organized around his major series, sections of the book – including ‘Rethinking History’, ‘Collecting Race’, ‘Forging Community’, and ‘Redrawing Boundaries’ – explore how his work engages with archives, bodies, museums and public space to challenge institutional narratives. Through critical analysis and illustrated throughout, Ken Gonzales-Day: History’s “Nevermade” illuminates the profound political and theoretical stakes of his art.
Essential reading for students, scholars, and practitioners in art history, photography, museum studies, American history and decolonial and queer studies, this book is a testament to the power of art to reckon with the past and imagine new futures.
The 352-page, fully illustrated Ken Gonzales-Day: History’s “Nevermade” (edited by Amelia Jones) accompanies the exhibition and offers an in-depth look at the artist’s life work. To read introduction, watch video interview, or to purchase.
Amelia Jones is Robert A. Day professor and vice dean at Roski School of Art & Design, USC, Los Angeles, USA. Recent publications include the catalogue Queer Communion: Ron Athey (2020), co-edited with Andy Campbell (accompanying a retrospective of Athey’s work, which she curated); and In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance (2021).
Past events:
3/14/25: USC: Examining Truth and History in Museums Panel
2/24/25: FRIEZE VIP: Exhibition Walkthrough with artist Ken Gonzales-Day
12/6/25: ONE Archives: Queer Photography
11/22/25: Fall of Freedom Event: Amelia Jones, Walkthrough and Teach-In
10/23/25: USC Fisher Museum: Queer, Trans and Two-Spirit Narratives
9/23/25: Roski Talks: Ken Gonzales-Day
9/9/25: USC Fisher: Artist & Curator Walkthrough with Amelia Jones & Ken Gonzales-Day