Public Art
D LINE SUBWAY EXTENSiON - Wilshire- Fairfax Concourse Level:
Gonzales-Day was selected to complete a major new commission for the new The D Line Subway Extension Project which will provide a high-capacity, high-speed and dependable alternative for commuters to travel between downtown Los Angeles, the Miracle Mile, Beverly Hills and Westwood. This project is being built in three sections. Read more about the transit project here. Gonzales-Day's artwork will be on the concourse level for the new Wilshire-Fairfax METRO station scheduled to open across the street from LACMA and the La Brea Tar Pits and slightly west of the Craft Contemporary in 2025. The piece's is titled, Urban Excavation: Ancestors, Avatars, Bodhisattvas, Buddhas, Casts, Copies, Deities, Figures, Funerary Objects, Gods, Guardians, Mermaids, Metaphors, Mothers, Possessions, Sages, Spirits, Symbols, and Other [LACMA] Objects and you can read more about it on the Metro site here.
To watch the video click here.
Project Description
Inspired by the idea of transporting the body and mind, and by the station as an excavation site, Ken Gonzales-Day‘s glass-tile mural for the north and south concourse level walls aims to transport transit customers across time and place by immersing them in an environment where images of objects—spanning many cultures, continents and eras—mined from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s permanent collection are reproduced at an enormous scale. Gonzales-Day’s artwork will invite viewers to think about museum collections and their connection to the outside world in unexpected ways.
Artist Statement
"I believe my project will offer visitors a chance to discover and rediscover some of the city’s richest cultural assets, as well as to further position Los Angeles within an increasingly global context.”
Detail of concourse level of the Wilshire/Fairfax station of the LA Metro, D Line.
Detail of concourse level of the Wilshire/Fairfax station of the LA Metro, D Line.
YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART with the YALE PEABODY:
The Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) and the Yale Peabody Museum present Ken Gonzales-Day: Composition in Black and Brown, a public art project in two parts. August 12 – December 31, 2024
Composition in Black and Brown I is a billboard on view from August 12 through October 27, 2024, on Interstate 95 North in West Haven, CT.
Composition in Black and Brown II is a vinyl artwork on view from August through December 2024 in the Lower Court windows of the YCBA, adjacent to the courtyard of Harvest Wine Bar and Restaurant at 1104 Chapel Street in New Haven, CT.
In the summer of 2023, Ken Gonzales-Day (b. 1964) was a visiting artist at the Yale Center for British Art. During his time in New Haven, he researched and photographed portrait busts and other sculptures in the collections of both the YCBA and the Yale Peabody Museum. The two museums then commissioned Gonzales-Day to create a public artwork. The result is Composition in Black and Brown (2024), an image that prompts questions about the historical constructions of race and the limits of representation.
According to the artist, this project “seeks to foreground questions of representation, encourage scholarship, embrace complex collaborative actions, invite institutional self-reflection, consider the contributions of individuals and groups in developing new approaches to historical looking, and embrace the visual arts’ ability to transform the world around and within us, for those who strive to apply the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion in pursuit of social justice.”
At the center of Ken Gonzales-Day’s Composition in Black and Brown are two sculptures. On the left is Bust of a Man, a portrait of an unknown Black sitter made around 1758 in the studio of British artist Francis Harwood (1726/7–1783), now in the YCBA collection. On the right is Statue of a Young Man, a Mexica figure made between 1350 and 1521 CE, now in the collection of the Yale Peabody Museum. Gonzales-Day chose these figures because of their singularity. Unlike other known examples from that period, the Mexica male is depicted in the nude. Bust of a Man is unusual for its time in that its subject is Black. (Essays on these two works, commissioned on the occasion of Gonzales-Day’s project, examine their respective histories. Click here for more.)
Flanking the pair are portrait busts in white marble dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, all of which are also from the YCBA collection. Most of these sitters were notable public figures of their time—lords and ladies, famous poets, statesmen, and others—rendered in a neoclassical style to highlight their status. “I chose these works because their institutional complexity resonated with my own intersectional approach to art making,” Gonzales-Day says of his assembly. “In a sense, Composition in Black and Brown is the culmination of many histories coming together.”
As part of his ongoing series Profiled (2008–), the artist has photographed portrait busts in the collections of approximately forty museums worldwide. The series addresses how racial bias has shaped representation, historical memory, museological practices, and modes of display. The artist achieves this by “reframing” his subjects, literally and figuratively, showing them in a new light. As Gonzales-Day explains, “The precise origin and use of all of the assembled works helped me to reflect on a number of different worldviews and to believe that the ‘making’ of the figure, like the making of an artwork, a ritual object, or a spiritual object, functions very differently once photographed.”
As an image, Composition in Black and Brown is a portrait of portraiture, in which the artist calls attention to how the sitters are treated. In this digital collage, Gonzales-Day foregrounds the Black and Mexica figures, framing them with white European figures to underscore the racialized contexts in which anthropologists and art historians have understood the central figures. The work’s full title includes the names of the artists and their prestigious sitters except for Bust of a Man and Young Man, whose precise origins and identities remain matters of conjecture.
The questions of who is excluded from the record— whose narratives are left untold—are not relegated to the museum. Designed to be displayed on a billboard on Interstate 95 North and in the Lower Court windows of the YCBA courtyard, Composition in Black and Brown brings its subjects to the streets. There, in Gonzales-Day’s words, “It is my hope that the display will engender new readings and allow viewers to consider one of the most fundamental of questions: Who is looking, who is being seen?”
To learn more about Bust of a Man.
To learn more about Stone Statue of Young Man.
To see the Timeline.
To learn more about the YCBA.
Composition in Black and Brown is part of Profiled (2008–), an photographic series that grew out of his research into the history of racial depictions in exhibitions and museum displays. Gonzales-Day has brought this project not only to the Yale Center for British Art and the Yale Peabody Museum but also to the J. Paul Getty Museum, Chicago’s Field Museum, the Trocadero Museum in Paris, the archive of the 1915–16 California-Panama Exposition in San Diego’s Balboa Park, and many others.
Gonzales-Day currently holds the Fletcher Jones Chair in Art at Scripps College in Claremont, CA. He is represented by Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, and serves on the board of directors of LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions).
About the Yale Center for British Art
The Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) houses the largest collection of British art outside the United Kingdom, encompassing works from the fifteenth century to the present in a range of media. The museum offers a vibrant, year-round program of events and exhibitions in person and online. Presented to the university by collector and philanthropist Paul Mellon (Yale College, Class of 1929), the museum opened to the public in 1977. The YCBA is currently closed for a major building conservation project and will reopen to the public in spring 2025. Visit the YCBA at britishart.yale.edu, and connect on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and X @yalebritishart.
Full title of work:
Ken Gonzales-Day, Composition in Black and Brown I (foreground: Yale Center for British Art, Francis Harwood, “Bust of a Man,” and Yale Peabody Museum, Central Mexico, “Young Man”; background, all Yale Center for British Art: William Brodie, “Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate”; John Gibson, “Aurora”; Joseph Nollekens, “Charles James Fox,” “Charlotte, fourth Duchess of Richmond,” and “Portrait of a Man, Probably Lord Granville Leveson-Gower”; John Nost III, “George III”; and Louis François Roubiliac, “Alexander Pope”), 2024, billboard, 14 × 48 feet
BILLBOARDS:
To date, Gonzales-Day has completed a number of temporary billboard installations and three permanent public art projects. They include an installation at LAXART (now, known as The Brick). Two billboards that were on display in Reno, NV. as a part of an exhibition of my work at the university gallery there.Two billboards were also included in by the ForFreedoms Initiative as part of the 50 States initiative which placed artist designed billboards in all 50 States to help get out the vote during the 2018 mid-term elections.
In addition, you will find a number of permanent and temporary installations.
The permanent projects are listed below and include the Los Angeles County Administrative Building on Vermont and 85th Street in South Central Los Angeles that include four large-scale photographic mural images fired on ceramic tile.
The Canoga Station of the Metro Gold Line in the S.F. Valley, which includes four large baked enamel images, and two mosaics. See below.
In 2015 Gonzales-Day created a public art project for the LAPD Metro Division Facility on Temple and Benton Way which includes eleven baked enamel images and considers the history of racial formation in relation to ideas of beauty and human difference by including reproductions of sculptural works photographed in a number of museums. The piece was created as a kind of memorial or "outdoor museum" to address the complex history of race associated with the history of the site. Part memorial, part institutional critique, the project brings together objects, some of which, were once used, in a museum context, to educate visitors in a number of different settings ranging from the World's Fair, to ethnographic museum displays.
Finally, at the bottom of the page are a few examples from a temporary Lightbox exhibition organized by METRO for Union Station in downtown Los Angeles which was on view for a just over a year.
REDMOND and MARYMOOR VILLAGE RAIL STATION:
Johnny Leggz, Downtown Redmond Station, Redmond, WA.
METRO ORANGE LINE - CANOGA STATION:
- Western Imaginary, 2012
- Two 40 in. x 264 in. photographic images (two-sided enamel on metal panels) and two mosaic ovals
- 96 in. x 312 in.
Project Description
Ken Gonzales-Day's photographs subtly refer to history embedded in the local landscape. Large, enamel steel art panels alongside platform seating areas depict views of surrounding mountains that overlook the valley. The wide, panoramic views are reminiscent of Westerns filmed in the hills from 1912-1960. Because the scenes are composite views, they act as ideal, imagined landscapes tinged with cowboy nostalgia. Stone and glass mosaic paving patterns depict kaleidoscopic views of native manzanita and oak trees, inviting passengers to find shapes and faces hidden within the natural patterns.
Artist Statement
"Inspired by the community's interest in drawing attention to the natural environment and combined with my own longstanding interest in both California history and native species, I decided to bring the natural environment into the station environment. I wanted to create artworks that would function on a number of levels and could respond to the specific needs of the site: one, to soften the stucco corridors and vast parking lots that surround it; two, to enhance the station itself; and three, I wanted to create something that would be a source of pride for local residents and of interest to those passing through."
Source: METRO
LOS ANGELES COUNTY ADMINISTRATIVE BUILDING:
Vermont at 84th Street, Los Angeles
In 2007, ICO Vermont, LLC completed a four-story, 220,000 square foot office building with a childcare center and retail space. The County of Los Angeles leased the new building for four County departments: Social Services, Children and Family Services, Child Support Services, and Mental Health. The facility houses 1,200 workers and 1,400 daily visitors.
Ken Gonzales-Day’s artwork softens and adds color to key walls within the building. He used photographic glazed tiles recessed into wall surfaces to create four murals. The high-quality 12” x 12” ceramic tile images are durable and graffiti resistant.
Ken Gonzales-Day’s murals depict imagery which is appropriate to the site and its uses. Occupied by County departments with the largest concentration of social service caseloads in the County, Gonzales-Day’s artworks add a calming effect to a sometimes tense environment. Large-scale images of traditional old California landscapes (mostly oak trees) are strategically placed throughout the building. Overall, Gonzales-Day’s work evokes a pure unaltered landscape full of optimism and possibility. It might also suggest a dreamscape of quiet, calm and purity on which the viewer might play out his or her hopes for a better tomorrow.
Source: Los Angeles County Arts Commission
Read about in the Los Angeles Times
LAPD METRO DIVISION:
- Public Art Project at Temple and Benton Way
- 19 40in. x 80in. enamel on metal panels
- Echo Park
This public art project is not a history of sculpture. It is a series of photographs of cultural artifacts representing people, both real and imagined, from various continents and created at various moments in history, from antiquity to the middle of the 20th century. Cast, carved and broken, these objects are reminders of the philosophical, metaphysical, spiritual, legal and scientific understandings of social constructions of race and racial difference over the course of 500 years. Given the diversity of this site and its history within the Los Angeles Police Department, this public artwork was created as an opportunity to re-imagine its past, current and future relationships with the many communities it serves.
Commissioned by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the Los Angeles Police Department.
UNION STATION - LIGHTBOX SERIES:
"A new exhibition of three artists’ work is on display inside Union Station illuminating the passageway walls connecting Union Station East and West. Organized by Metro Art, the display consists of thirty-six lightboxes and showcases photographic artwork.
The presentation, titled “Divining Los Angeles Landscapes,” introduces 36 photographic artworks created by three prominent artists: Joyce Campbell, Ken Gonzales-Day and John Humble. Each artist contributed twelve photographs organized around themes of nature, the unnatural and supernatural.
This is only the second exhibition of artwork to enliven the passageway. The first photographic artworks to be featured celebrated Union Station as “The Heart of Los Angeles” on the occasion of its 75th anniversary in 2014.
Ken Gonzales-Day’s vibrant color photographs, titled Oak and Thistle: Views of the Santa Monica and San Gabriel Mountains, feature Los Angeles County’s natural recreation areas and green spaces, which highlight the beauty of California’s landscape. The series depicts the rolling hills and native flora of western Los Angeles at Cheeseboro and Palo Comado Canyon and captures the foothill woodlands that run along the San Gabriel Mountains to the east through images taken at Descanso Gardens. By presenting the wilder edges of the Los Angeles landscape, the artist hopes to provide commuters and visitors to Union Station an opportunity for contemplation, and perhaps serve as an invitation to visit some of the many places where nature can still be enjoyed."
Commissioned by METRO Arts and on view July 1, 2015- Dec. 1, 2016