Ken Gonzales-Day: History's "Nevermade"
Curated by Amelia Jones, Robert Day Professor and Vice Dean of Faculty and Research at the USC Roski School of Art & Design
About the Exhibition
WORKS
- 87 photographs
- 39 ink/pencil illustrations on paper
- 9 paintings
- 2 mixed media sculptures
- 1 video work
DIMENSIONS
See checklist below.
SPACE REQUIREMENTS
~5,000 sq, ft.
INQUIRIES
exhibitions@curatorial.org | 626.577.0044
FEE
Please inquire.
Curated by Amelia Jones, Robert A. Day Professor and Vice Dean of Faculty and Research at Roski School of Art & Design, Ken Gonzales-Day: Historyʼs “Nevermade” is the first mid-career survey of the work of artist Ken Gonzales-Day (b. 1964), bringing together over 100 pieces from Gonzales-Dayʼs career of over three decades.
Exploring cultural memory through his photographs, drawings, and paintings as well as through research and scholarship, artist, teacher, and scholar Gonzales-Day has contributed profound insights to the understanding of race and place in the United States. This survey exhibition seeks to put the major series of photographic works, film/video, drawings, and paintings in context, showing the deep political, historical, and theoretical concerns through which Gonzales-Day animates the range of works and pointing to larger American political issues in relation to which each series can be understood.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Ken Gonzales-Day's interdisciplinary and conceptually grounded projects consider the history of photography, the construction of race, and the limits of representational systems from lynching photography to museum displays. Gonzales-Dayʼs work has been exhibited internationally and is in the permanent collections of the Getty Museum, LACMA, École des Beaux Arts (Paris), the National Portrait Gallery, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others. His monographs include Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 (Duke) and Profiled (LACMA, 2011). Gonzales-Day holds the Fletcher Jones Chair in Art and is a Professor at Scripps College. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in photography in 2017.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Amelia Jones is Robert A. Day Professor and Vice Dean of Faculty and Research at Roski School of Art & Design, USC, and is a curator and scholar of contemporary art, performance, and feminist and sexuality studies. Recent publications include Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (2012); a volume co-edited with Erin Silver, Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories (2016); and the edited special issue “On Trans/Performance” of “Performance Research” (2016). Jonesʼs catalogue Queer Communion: Ron Athey (2020), co-edited with Andy Campbell, and which accompanied a retrospective of Atheyʼs work at Participant Inc. (New York) and ICA (Los Angeles), was listed among Best Art Books 2020 in the The New York Times. Her 2021 book entitled In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance explores the history of performance art and queer theory since the 1950s, from a queer feminist point of view. She is currently working on a book addressing the neoliberalism and structural racism in the Euro-American university and art complex.