Exhibition

Ken Gonzales-Day: Composition in Black and Brown

Monday, August 5, 2024–Sunday, January 5, 2025

Free admission

The Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) and Yale Peabody Museum together present Ken Gonzales-Day: Composition in Black and Brown, a two-part public art project emerging from the artist’s engagement with the collections.

Composition in Black and Brown I

Composition in Black and Brown I is a billboard on view from August to October, 2024 on Interstate 95 North in West Haven, Connecticut.

Composition in Black and Brown II

Composition in Black and Brown II is a site-specific vinyl artwork on view from August to early January 2025 in the windows of the Lower Court of the YCBA, adjacent to the courtyard of Harvest Wine Bar and Restaurant at 1104 Chapel Street in New Haven.

cover showing a billboard on a bright day

Overview

In the summer of 2023, Ken Gonzales-Day (b. 1964) was a visiting artist at the Yale Center for British Art. During his time in New Haven, he researched and photographed portrait busts and other sculptures in the collections of both the YCBA and the Yale Peabody Museum. The two museums then commissioned Gonzales-Day to create a public artwork. The result is Composition in Black and Brown (2024), an image that prompts questions about the historical constructions of race and the limits of representation.

According to the artist, this project “seeks to foreground questions of representation, encourage scholarship, embrace complex collaborative actions, invite institutional self-reflection, consider the contributions of individuals and groups in developing new approaches to historical looking, and embrace the visual arts’ ability to transform the world around and within us, for those who strive to apply the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion in pursuit of social justice.”

About the work

At the center of Ken Gonzales-Day’s Composition in Black and Brown are two sculptures. On the left is Bust of a Man, a portrait of an unknown Black sitter made around 1758 in the studio of British artist Francis Harwood (1726/7–1783), now in the YCBA collection. On the right is Statue of a Young Man, a Mexica figure made between 1350 and 1521 CE, now in the collection of the Yale Peabody Museum. Gonzales-Day chose these figures because of their singularity. Unlike other known examples from that period, the Mexica male is depicted in the nude. Bust of a Man is unusual for its time in that its subject is Black. (Essays on Bust of a Man and Stone Statue of a Young Man, commissioned on the occasion of Gonzales-Day’s project, examine their respective histories.)

Flanking the pair are portrait busts in white marble dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, all of which are also from the YCBA collection. Most of these sitters were notable public figures of their time—lords and ladies, famous poets, statesmen, and others—rendered in a neoclassical style to highlight their status. “I chose these works because their institutional complexity resonated with my own intersectional approach to art making,” Gonzales-Day says of his assembly. “In a sense, Composition in Black and Brown is the culmination of many histories coming together.”

As part of his ongoing series Profiled (2008–), the artist has photographed portrait busts in the collections of approximately forty museums worldwide. The series addresses how racial bias has shaped representation, historical memory, museological practices, and modes of display. The artist achieves this by “reframing” his subjects, literally and figuratively, showing them in a new light. As Gonzales-Day explains, “The precise origin and use of all of the assembled works helped me to reflect on a number of different worldviews and to believe that the ‘making’ of the figure, like the making of an artwork, a ritual object, or a spiritual object, functions very differently once photographed.”

As an image, Composition in Black and Brown is a portrait of portraiture, in which the artist calls attention to how the sitters are treated. In this digital collage, Gonzales-Day foregrounds the Black and Mexica figures, framing them with white European figures to underscore the racialized contexts in which anthropologists and art historians have understood the central figures. The work’s full title includes the names of the artists and their prestigious sitters except for Bust of a Man and Young Man, whose exact origins and identities remain matters of conjecture.

The questions of who is excluded from the record— whose narratives are left untold—are not relegated to the museum. Designed to be displayed on a billboard on Interstate 95 North and in the Lower Court windows of the YCBA courtyard, Composition in Black and Brown brings its subjects to the streets. There, in Gonzales-Day’s words, “It is my hope that the display will engender new readings and allow viewers to consider one of the most fundamental of questions: Who is looking, who is being seen?”

About the artist

Ken Gonzales-Day (b. 1964) is a Los Angeles–based, queer, Chicanx, Latine/x, interdisciplinary artist and educator of mixed ancestry who has transformed the understanding of racialized violence in the United States. His widely exhibited photographic series Erased Lynching (2002–) and his book Lynching in the West, 1850–1935 (Duke University Press, 2006) have raised awareness of the lynching of Asians, Latinos, Indigenous Americans, and Black Americans in California, and helped to situate both anti-immigration movements and acts of collective violence within larger discussions of racism, policing, and justice.

Composition in Black and Brown is part of Profiled (2008–), an photographic series that grew out of his research into the history of racial depictions in exhibitions and museum displays. Gonzales-Day has brought this project not only to the Yale Center for British Art and the Yale Peabody Museum but also to the J. Paul Getty Museum, Chicago’s Field Museum, the Trocadero Museum in Paris, the archive of the 1915–16 California-Panama Exposition in San Diego’s Balboa Park, and many others.

Gonzales-Day currently holds the Fletcher Jones Chair in Art at Scripps College in Claremont, CA. He is represented by Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, and serves on the board of directors of LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions).

In-Person Program

Artists in Conversation: Ken Gonzales-Day
Thursday, September 12, 4–5 pm, reception to follow

Please join us for Ken Gonzales-Day in conversation with Martina Droth, Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Yale Center for British Art. Together, they will discuss the origins of Gonzales-Day’s project Composition in Brown and Black, for which he photographed works in the collections of the YCBA and the Yale Peabody Museum in order to prompt questions about the historical constructions of race and the limits of representation.