Ken Gonzales-Day: Composition in Black and Brown
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.
About Ken Gonzales-Day
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).
