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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.

Searching for California Hang Trees

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Nightfall II, a photograph by Ken-Gonzales-Day of hand like tree limbs that arise from twisted roots with a dark background.  It is from his Searching for California Hang Trees series.

Ken Gonzales-Day
Nightfall II, 2006
Archival ink on fiber rag paper
22.5 x 46 in. edition of 5, 2 AP
40 x 84 in., edition of 3, 2 AP

 

Ken Gonzales-Day Run Up, 2002

Ken Gonzales-Day
Run Up, 2002
Archival ink on fiber rag paper
36 x 46 in. edition of 5, 2 AP
55 x 75 in., edition of 3, 2 AP

Ken Gonzales-Day At daylight the miserable man was carried to an oak, 2002

Ken Gonzales-Day
At daylight the miserable man was carried to an oak, 2002
Archival ink on fiber rag paper
36 x 46 in. edition of 5, 2 AP
55 x 75 in., edition of 3, 2 AP

Ken Gonzales-Day Two men were found on a tree, 2005

Ken Gonzales-Day
Two men were found on a tree, 2005
Archival ink on fiber rag paper
36 x 46 in. edition of 5, 2 AP
55 x 75 in., edition of 3, 2 AP

Ken Gonzales-Day Into Eternity, 2007

Ken Gonzales-Day
Into Eternity, 2007
Archival ink on fiber rag paper
36 x 43 in. edition of 5, 2 AP
55 x 66 in., edition of 3, 2 AP

Ken Gonzales-Day Golden Chain, 2005

Ken Gonzales-Day
Golden Chain, 2005
Archival ink on fiber rag paper
36 x 46 in. edition of 5, 2 AP
55 x 75 in., edition of 3, 2 AP

Ken Gonzales-Day Next morning when Jimmy woke the cowboys were gone, Livermore, CA, 2003

Ken Gonzales-Day
Next morning when Jimmy woke the cowboys were gone, Livermore, CA, 2003
Archival ink on fiber rag paper
36 x 46 in. edition of 5, 2 AP
55 x 75 in., edition of 3, 2 AP

Ken Gonzales-Day Fort Humbolt, Eureka, 2005

Ken Gonzales-Day
Fort Humbolt, Eureka, 2005
Archival ink on fiber rag paper
46 x 36 in. edition of 5, 2 AP
75 x 55 in., edition of 3, 2 AP

Ken Gonzales-Day Old Oregon Trail, 2005

Ken Gonzales-Day
Old Oregon Trail, 2005
Archival ink on fiber rag paper
36 x 46 in. edition of 5, 2 AP
55 x 75 in., edition of 3, 2 AP

Ken Gonzales-Day About a hundred yards from the road, 2002

Ken Gonzales-Day
About a hundred yards from the road, 2002
Archival ink on fiber rag paper
36 x 46 in. edition of 5, 2 AP
50 x 62 in., edition of 3, 2 AP

Ken Gonzales-Day, With none but the omni-present stars to witness, 2002

Ken Gonzales-Day

With none but the omni-present stars to witness, 2002
Archival ink on fiber rag paper
36 x 46 in. edition of 5, 2 AP
55 x 75 in., edition of 3, 2 AP

Ken Gonzales-Day Near Horintos, 2005

Ken Gonzales-Day
Near Horintos, 2005
Archival ink on fiber rag paper
36 x 46 in. edition of 5, 2 AP
50 x 62 in., edition of 3, 2 AP

Searching for California's Hang Trees (2000 – ongoing) grew out of Gonzales-Day's research into the history of lynching in California and continues to build the most comprehensive record of lynching in California. Searching for California's Hang Trees serves as a physical testimony to Gonzales-Day’s research visits to over 300 alleged lynching sites in California. The images also show the intrusion of time and development, or 'progress', around the trees and upon the landscape: roads, buildings, construction sites – all signifying to a certain extent the idea of the past being buried or covered up – another form of "erasure". 

 

Exclusively employing an antique Deardorff large format camera, the artist engages with the history of landscape photography in California and recalls the legacies of violence associated with US colonialism and Manifest Destiny. Gonzales-Day spent several years researching in local archives and scanning microfilm while making multiple expeditions across the state looking for clues to the little-known history. Though ambitious in scope, the artist places great importance in searching for and finding as many of these sites as possible in order to bear belated historical witness to these locations and contemplate what they represent. The research and records for over 353 cases documented by Gonzales-Day is in no way complete, but has become the most complete list of cases published to date.

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