Ken Gonzales-Day
Run Up, a 2015 reenactment of the lynching of "Spanish Charlie", is a short film inspired by California’s last documented lynching of a Latinx. The film is based on research uncovered in Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 (Duke, 2006) which shed new light on lynching in the American Southwest. In California, Latinxs, Native American, and Chinese constituted the majority of cases of lynching. The film was produced by Gonzales-Day and directed by Andrew Hines. Gonzales-Day conceived and photographed a series of staged tableau which speaks to a photographic history of recreating historical events.
The film and photographic series were the central elements of the exhibition Run Up at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles which also included a series of photographs taken in Ferguson in the aftermath of the Michael Brown shooting. The exhibition sought to highlight the many overlaps between the Black Lives Matter movement and Gonzales-Day’s work to raise awareness of historic and contemporary accounts of police and state violence against Latinx communities. The exhibition also included images documenting protests resulting from the Minnesota Grand Jury verdict not to prosecute the officers involved in Brown’s shooting.