Skip to content
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 Aaron, 2005-2013

Ken Gonzales-Day
Aaron, 2005-2013
Lighjet Print on Aluminum
40 x 30 in.
Edition of 5, 2 AP

Ken Gonzales-Day Anthony, 2005-2013

Ken Gonzales-Day
Anthony, 2005-2013
Lighjet Print on Aluminum
40 x 30 in.
Edition of 5, 2 AP

Ken Gonzales-Day Gordon, 2005-12

Ken Gonzales-Day
Gordon, 2005-12
LightJet print on aluminum
40 x 30 in.
Edition of 5, 2 AP

The Memento Mori series was one of three photographic projects that grew out of Gonzales-Day's research into the history of lynching for his first monograph, Lynching in the West, 1850-1935 (Duke University Press, 2006). The series began during his research of racial profiling in California and looking for new ways to represent a history of radicalized violence that had largely been forgotten. Through his research he was able to reveal, for the first time, that race was a factor in the history of lynching in California which, even up to that time, had been regularly mischaracterized by historians as part of a race-neutral fantasy of white on white violence, which existed as well.

 

The Memento Mori portraits were an essential part of a larger strategy to use his artistic practice to raise awareness and create a visual language to address the history of radicalized violence in California. Because BIPOC and Latinx bodies figured so prominently in this history, Gonzales-Day photographed a range of models from different groups and was also struck by the fact that so many of the lynching victims were described as being young men. Gonzales-Day's portraits of contemporay young Latino men are stand-ins for California lynching victims who were often between the ages of 16 and 22.  The men sport contemporary hairstyles, clothing and tattoos. Isolated against dark backgrounds and gaze serenely or defiantly back at the viewer. Just as the artist wanted to experience the lynching sites in his Erased Lynchings and In Search for California Hang Trees series, he wondered what the victims might have looked like. "I was also interested in sharing this history with young Latino men," he says, "telling them about it, seeing what their responses were."

Back To Top