The Claremont Lewis Museum of Art exhibition Face to Face: Ken Gonzales-Day presents the unflinching and innovative photography of artist Ken Gonzales-Day. A Scripps College art professor since 1995, Gonzales-Day has been exploring the history of race and its representation for over two decades. This exhibition juxtaposes two overlapping bodies of work, Pandemic Portraits and Profiled, to confront our often unexamined modes of seeing. 

The exhibition, generously sponsored by The Muchnic Family Charitable Fund, opened with a reception on Saturday, October 7 from 6-9 pm, and will remain on view through January 21, 2024. Art Walk dates in 2023 are November 4 and December 2, and in 2024 January 6.

The exhibition, curated by Seth Pringle, associate director of exhibitions & collections, begins with the Pandemic Portraits series which Gonzales-Day began producing during the height of the Covid-19 Pandemic. The portraits are mostly of artists, actors, arts professionals, dancers, models, and writers. Gonzales-Day operated within the limits of social distancing protocols in order to create connections, some with old friends, some new. The resulting images may only feature a single subject, but they represent a commitment to co-existence.

The second body of work, entitled Profiled, features photographs taken in the storage facilities of the Smithsonian Institution’s American Art Museum, National Museum of Natural History, and National Portrait Gallery in 2014 as a critical examination of the ways that beauty, race, and human difference were seen in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This research-based photographic project demonstrates a critical approach to history and suggests the importance of reconsidering these often-contested objects and the legacies from which they came.

These two bodies of work come face to face through two distinguished members of the Osage Nation. Dr. Steven Pratt’s 2022 portrait will be displayed adjacent to a photograph of a bust depicting his great grandfather Shonke Mon-thi^, a sculpture held in the collection of the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of Natural History. The meeting of these two photographic projects and these two cultural leaders/ancestors brings into focus the power of portraiture and its complex, often fraught, relationship with American history. The exhibition is generously sponsored by The Muchnic Family Charitable Fund.

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