For more than a decade, Los Angeles–based interdisciplinary artist Ken Gonzales-Day (b. 1964) has photographed statues and portrait busts in museum collections to question the construction of race in these selective environments. In summer 2023, Gonzales-Day was a visiting artist at the YCBA. While on campus, he photographed sculptures in the collections of the YCBA and the Yale Peabody Museum. After his residency, Gonzales-Day was commissioned by the YCBA to create a public artwork.
Composition in Black and Brown I
Composition in Black and Brown I is a billboard on view from August 5 through October 27, 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 December 2024 in the windows of the west façade of the YCBA, adjacent to the courtyard of Harvest Wine Bar and Restaurant at 1104 Chapel Street in New Haven.
Top image
Ken Gonzales-Day, Composition in Black and Brown I (foreground: Yale Center for British Art, Francis Harwood, “Bust of a Man,” and Yale Peabody Museum, Central Mexico, “Young Man”; background, all Yale Center for British Art: William Brodie, “Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate”; John Gibson, “Aurora”; Joseph Nollekens, “Charles James Fox,” “Charlotte, fourth Duchess of Richmond,” and “Portrait of a Man, Probably Lord Granville Leveson-Gower”; John Nost III, “George III”; and Louis François Roubiliac, “Alexander Pope”), 2024, billboard, 14 × 28 feet
