Ken Gonzales-Day

Ken Gonzales-Day (born 1964) is a Los Angeles-based conceptual artist best known for interdisciplinary projects that examine the historical construction of race, identity, and systems of representation including lynching photographs, museum display and street art. His widely exhibited "Erased Lynching" photographic series and book, Lynching in the West: 1850-1935, document the absence in historical accounts of the lynching of Latinos, Native Americans and Asians in California's early history. The series has toured in traveling exhibitions staged by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Smithsonian Institution and Minnesota Museum of American Art, and appeared at the Tamayo Museum (Mexico City), Generali Foundation (Vienna) and Palais de Tokyo in Paris, among other venues.

Ken Gonzales-Day, The Wonder Gaze (St. James Park), "Erased Lynching" series, 2006 Los Angeles Times critic Holly Myers writes that Gonzales-Day's work conveys "a palpable quality of tenderness" through a "delicate form of visual ethics" that explores racial tendencies, perceptions and presumptions "without pinning the dialogue to actual individuals"; curator Gonzalo Casals describes his method as "simple artistic gesture that allow for the reinterpretation of history, opening up new perspectives and allowing for the voices of the 'other' to rise above the official history." Gonzales-Day was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in photography in 2017, and is the Fletcher Jones Chair in Art at Scripps College in Claremont, California.

Early life and education

Gonzales-Day was born in Santa Clara, California in 1964 to parents of mixed ethnicity and grew up in Northern California and Idaho; his father's family dates back to 17th-century New Mexico. Gonzales-Day went on to earn an MFA at University of California, Irvine (1995). He began teaching at Scripps College in 1995, serving as Professor of Art and Chair of the Art and Art and Art History departments through various terms. His conceptually oriented photography often focuses on historical gaps, literalized through prominent blank spaces or "visual silences";

Early work

Gonzales-Day's early art focuses on issues surrounding identity, multiculturalism and prejudice—which relate to his own liminal position as a gay Mexican-American—and on broader social concerns, including the AIDS crisis, queer rights, and immigration. Bone Grass Boy: The Secret Banks of the Conejos River (1993–6, recreated in 2017) explores these issues through the lens of his family's complex genealogy, which he re-envisioned as an invented Mexican–American War-era narrative whose partial text is presented as a historical artifact. The project combines the appropriation of master-painting poses and scenes, Pictures Generation-style costumed self-portraiture, and early digital imaging techniques in photographic tableaux in which Gonzales-Day portrays a wide cast of female and male ancestors/characters. and "marvelous patterns assembled like a mosaic."

"Erased Lynching" series (2002–17) and related works The Erased Lynchings series arose out of research Gonzales-Day conducted that uncovered more than 350 lynchings of Latinos, Native Americans and Asians as well as African-Americans in California between 1850 and 1935, the most perpetrated against Latinos. an unprecedented textual and visual examination of California lynching in relation to frontier justice, race-based theories of criminality, whiteness, and public and photographed spectacle as visual culture. The book draws on newspaper articles, periodicals, and court records to reconstruct the circumstances surrounding the lynchings and juxtaposes Gonzales-Day's contemporary photographs of lynching sites with historical artifacts.

For "Searching for California Hang Trees" (2002–14), Gonzales-Day sought to visit and photograph the more than 300 California lynching sites he uncovered. Critics suggest that the trees' twisted roots, interwoven branches, and thick trunks—suggesting age, wisdom, silent witness and a land heavy with history—offer a critical look at landscape photography and the erasure of uncomfortable legacies within seemingly pastoral locales. In several exhibitions, Gonzales-Day juxtaposed the hang trees with his "Memento Mori" bust-length, frontal portraits of contemporary Latino men matching the lynching victims in age and ethnicity, which reviewers describe as similarly "elegant, muscular and mute." Leah Ollman wrote, the film's "episodic and discontinuous, mildly haunting" approach shifts actions between cover of night and light of day, "conjuring the lynching's variable realities as suppressed history and public spectacle." Critic Sharon Mizota writes that in works such as one with facing black marble busts—one African, one recognizably Caucasian (see image, right)—what emerges "is something more tender and strange… the impassive sculptural pairs begin to look oddly like couples, gazing at each other across boundaries of geography, time and ignorance."

Gonzales-Day traced the idea further in the exhibition, "UnSeen: Our Past in a New Light" (Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, 2018), in photographs of sculptural depictions of Native American and First Nations people from museum collections in Washington, DC. In the course of his work, Gonzales-Day discovered a forgotten piece of history: a neglected 1904 bust of the Osage priest, Shonke Mon-thi^; working with museum personnel, he uncovered the priest's story and historical importance, and the Portrait Gallery—dedicated to prominent historical figures—acquired his photo of the bust.

In 2024, Gonzales-Day's work was included in Xican-a.o.x. Body, a group exhibition at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, which traveled from the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture at the Riverside Art Museum. The show expanded on the contributions and experiences of Chicano artists to art historical narratives and contemporary discourse. An accompanying publication was released by Chicago University Press.

Public art and related projects Gonzales-Day has produced permanent public art works as well as temporary billboard installations of images from his "Erased Lynching" and "Profiled" series, some included as part of a For Freedoms fifty-state voting Initiative ahead of the 2018 U.S. mid-term elections.

His four photographic glazed-tile murals at the South Central Los Angeles County Administrative Building (2007) offer calming images of traditional California oaks in an often-stressful environment (e.g., California Landscape); an installation at the San Fernando Valley Canoga Metro Station (2012) subtly integrates the local landscape into the built environment with four large porcelain-enamel images of composite, imagined views of the surrounding mountains and two glass mosaics depicting kaleidoscopic, patterned images of native manzanita and oak trees. featured public artwork by other, often anonymous, artists—more than 140 images documenting street art throughout Los Angeles. The exhibition included a room-wide floor map tracing his documentary journey that served as an index to the works and explored the relationships between areas densely or sparsely populated with street art.

Wilshire/Fairfax Station, D Line Subway Extension Project: "Inspired by the concept of moving both body and mind, and by the station itself as an excavation site, the glass murals invite transit riders on a journey through time and across continents. Larger than life images of objects, drawn from the vast and diverse collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, create an immersive environment that blurs the line between past and present. The artwork encourages viewers to think about museum collections and their connections to the outside world in unexpected ways."

Awards and recognition

Gonzales-Day has been awarded fellowships from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation (2017) and California Community Foundation (2007), the Photographic Arts Council Prize, and grants from Creative Capital, the City of Los Angeles (COLA) (both 2012), and National Endowment for the Arts (1997, 1996). Monographs of Gonzales-Day's work include Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 (2006), Profiled (LACMA, 2011), and Surface Tension (2018), Ken Gonzales-Day: History's "Nevermade" (Edited by Amelia Jones, 2025).