Archive Project 30: Ken Gonzales-Day

Catalogue Essay | Images from the Exhibition Ken Gonzales-Day Home Page | Fall 2006 Archive

The Project Series
Project 30: Ken Gonzales-Day

“Ken Gonzales-Day Hang Trees” includes new photographs from three related bodies of work, all connected through his investigations into the representation of, and, more significantly, the absence of representations of Latinos in the documented history of the American West. For the past five years, Gonzales-Day has explored, with a variety of strategies, the history of lynching in California.

This project began as a photographic study of Latino portraits from 1850 to 1900 in California. During his research, he discovered that the earliest photographs of Latinos he found were of criminals condemned to die, and later photographs were of lynching images—the latter images widely disseminated on postcards that documented the executions. Thus began the artistic process and the scholarly research that culminated in both the works on view in this exhibition, and in a book published this fall from Duke University Press: Lynching in the West: 1850-1935.

“Ken Gonzales-Day Hang Trees” brings together images from three series: digitally altered historical postcards of lynchings in which the victim has been erased; photographs of lynching trees presented in the classic tradition of landscape photography—the “Hang Trees;” and the newest work, photographic portraits of Latino men that evocatively resist the erasure of the Latino subject. As an artist, photographer, and scholar, Gonzales-Day traveled to and photographed as many sites of lynchings as he could. He describes his work in the introduction to Lynching in the West: 1850-1935, “I retraced the steps of the lynch mob and vigilance committee and these photographs have become an irrefutable record of my journey. Standing at these sites, even the most beautiful landscape is un-done…the photographs have come to symbolize points of resistance in a vast landscape…I have documented the empty space that lies between the historically unseen body of the lynch victim and my own unseen body.”

Gonzales-Day confronts the viewer by placing them, as Juli Carson describes: “squarely in the position of erasure—there is no body for us to see and control with our gaze—we are at once phenomenologically put into the place of the subject of the work, both as the lynched (it could be me up on that empty tree) and the lyncher (it could be me in that lynch crowd).” And now, with Gonzales-Day’s extension of this project through portraiture, he brings the project, and us, full circle, to make fully visible those who have been invisible. Gonzales-Day’s complex project corrects the historical record, reveals this tragic history to the public, and acknowledges and memorializes the victims by addressing the legacy of violence and terror experienced by racial communities in the American West.

Ken Gonzales-Day’s exhibition is the thirtieth in the Pomona College Museum of Art’s Project Series, an ongoing program of focused exhibitions that brings to the Pomona College campus art that is experimental and that introduces new forms, techniques, or concepts. The Project Series is supported in part by the Pasadena Art Alliance and Pomona College Museum of Art Advisory Committee member Sarah Miller Meigs.

Rebecca McGrew
Curator