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Ken Gonzales-Day

Image by Richard Caspole.

Ken Gonzales-Day’s interdisciplinary and conceptually grounded photographic projects consider the history of photography, the construction of race, and the limits of representational systems. Gonzales-Day has received awards from the California Community Foundation, COLA, Creative Capital, and Art Matters. Fellowships include The Rockefeller foundation in Bellagio, Italy; The Terra Foundation in Gervany, France; The Getty GRI; Smithsonian SARF and SAAM fellowships; and the Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography. Gonzales-Day holds the Fletcher Jones Chair in Art at Scripps College. Gonzales-Day has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions and significant group exhibitions in domestic and international institutions. Notable solo exhibitions include Ken Gonzales-Day: History’s Nevermade, curated by Amelia Jones, USC Fisher Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2025-26); Composition in Black and Brown, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT (2024-25); UnSeen: Our Past in A New Light, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C. (2018-19), amongst others.

Gonzales-Day’s exhaustive research and book Lynching in the West, 1850-1935 (2006) led to a re-evaluation of the history of lynching in this country. The book shed light on the little-known history of frontier justice and vigilantism. The Erased Lynchings series of photographs was a product of this research, which revealed that race was a contributing factor in California's own history of lynching and vigilantism, and through which he discovered that the majority of victims were Mexican or, like him, Mexican American. Gonzales-Day takes the same scholarly approach to his ongoing Profiled series, which looks to the depiction of race and the construction of whiteness in the representation of the human form as points of departure from which to consider the evolution and transformation of Enlightenment ideas about beauty, class, freedom, and progress. The series was awarded the first Photo Arts Council Prize (PAC) by LACMA and documented in a handsome monograph. It is Gonzales-Day’s continual engagement with history and his interest in peeling back the layers that makes his work so powerful and continuously relevant.

Gonzales-Day's work can be found in many prominent collections, including Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA; The National Gallery Art, Washington, DC; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; Museum of Modern Art, New York; George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach, FL; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Minnesota Museum of American Art, St. Paul, MN; Kalamazoo Institute of Art, Kalamazoo, MI; Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; The Art Museum of Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA; Middlebury College Museum of Art, Middlebury, VT; Williamson Gallery, Scripps College, Claremont, CA; Pomona College Museum of Art, CA; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris; Musee National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris; Eileen Norton Harris Foundation; AltaMed Art Collection, Los Angeles; 21C Museum Hotels, Louisville, KY; City of Los Angeles, CA; and Metropolitan Transit Authority, Los Angeles, CA among others.

Ken Gonzales-Day The Unresolved Case of Spanish Charlie, 2014

Ken Gonzales-Day
The Unresolved Case of Spanish Charlie, 2014
C-print
22 x 60 in.

Run Up (2014) is the latest chapter in Ken Gonzales-Day’s acclaimed Erased Lynchings series, selections of which have been acquired by the Smithsonian Institution and the Norton Museum of Art and have also been exhibited internationally in museums and galleries in Los Angeles, New York, Toronto, London, Paris, Vienna, Mexico City, Guadalajara, Medellín, Bogota, among others. 

Based on Gonzales-Day’s 2006 Pulitzer prize-nominated publication Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 (Duke University Press), this new film and photographic series evoke an episode from the little known history of lynching in California. The primary difference between this project and conventional narrative depictions of lynching and vigilantism previously found in films ranging from Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns to Steve McQueen’s recent 12 Years a Slave, is that in this version, the victim’s body will not be visible in the final moments of the scene (either through special effects or editing).

The absence of the lynching victim in this film, and accompanying photographic series, intentionally seeks to disrupt the normative power of racial victimization, raise awareness about America’s other lynching victims (Asians, Latinos, and Native Americans) and perhaps reflect on the broader question of capital punishment currently taking place in the United States. 

The main characters in Run Up are two mob leaders, three men with ropes, an elegant couple that passes by, four primary onlookers, and several Latina and black female onlookers (whose poses are based on sculptural depiction of Three Graces found in the Gypsothèque du Musée de Louvre). The racially diverse mob is meant to suggest this complexity and to reflect on many of California’s own cases which often included Asians, Latinos, European Americans, Europeans, and African Americans—as is documented in one non-California case. While the project takes its inspiration from California’s little known history of lynching, it also reaches beyond its historical source material in order to help address not only prison reform in the U.S., but a wide range of contemporary conflicts arising from social, political, and ethnic disparities nationally and even globally, as found in the Middle East, former Soviet Union, and Africa, today

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