Ken Gonzales-Day, The Wonder Gaze (St. James Park), “Erased Lynching” series, 2006
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Gonzales-Day coined the term “nevermade” to describe imagined historical documents—works that challenge who writes history, what is included, and what is left out.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.
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.
By Chistopher Knight
“Ken Gonzales-Day: History’s ‘Nevermade’” offers a sharp retrospective of an artist who explores the way social erasure of identity — race, gender, class — operates in American life.
Beginning around 2002, Gonzales-Day began to alter largely forgotten old photographs that document the mob ruthlessness of lynching, an astounding brutality that helped shape the history of the American West.
The USC Fisher Museum of Art is too small to accommodate a full Gonzales-Day retrospective, but it’s still worth seeing. Its focus on the shredding of civil society is timely.
By David S. Rubin
LOS ANGELES — Ken Gonzales-Day is both an artist and a scholar: Most of his art projects result from extensive research, and some have been published in book form. As revealed in the illuminating exhibition History’s “Nevermade” at the University of Southern California’s Fisher Museum of Art, Gonzales-Day has spent over three decades studying and responding to the absence of people like himself — gay and Latinx — from historical records. As the Trump administration attempts to purge any such content from the Smithsonian museums, a presentation of the artist’s projects could not be any timelier.