Ken Gonzales-Day

Profiled assembles depictions of race and difference drawn from the sculpture and portrait bust collections of museums in Europe, North and South America, and Asia, including The J. Paul Getty Museum, The Field Museum, L'École des Beaux-Arts, The Bode Museum, and Sanssouci Palace, among others.  This ongoing project is as an exploration of the influence of eighteenth century "scientific" thought on twenty-first century institutions ranging from the prison to the museum, andreveals the emergence of "whiteness" as an aesthetic canon that dates from that period and continues into the present.  Profiled is not a history of sculpture—rather, it is a conceptual clustering of cultural artifacts arranged to foreground the emergence, idealization and even the folly of race.  As such, Profiled strives to create a new context from which to consider these sometimes-ambiguous objects.

As the Pulitzer prize winning art critic Mark Feneeny has written: "What Gonzales-Day records is a much larger form of racial profiling, though, than the sort practiced by law-enforcement personnel.  For centuries, Western art has operated under a certain set of assumptions about what did, and did not, constitute beauty.  Those assumptions simultaneously shaped and reflected even larger assumptions about human value.  The fact that the classically-inspired statuary was considered art, while renderings of African, Native American, and other non-Western people were assigned to the category of anthropology, speaks volumes.  Seeing two such images juxtaposed within the same frame is to witness a cross-cultural dialogue all the more eloquent for its silence."