Artist and Curator Walkthrough with Amelia Jones and Ken Gonzales-Day

Join us for an exhibition walkthrough of Ken Gonzales-Day: History’s “Nevermade” led by curator Amelia G. Jones and artist Ken Gonzales-Day. Explore cultural memory through Gonzales-Day’s photographs, drawings, paintings, and scholarship research that confronts the omissions and erasures in official narratives, especially those related to race, place, memory, and identity in the United States. His work foregrounds the power of imagery to expose how American history silenced voices, bringing these stories to the forefront. 

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

Ken Gonzales-Day is a Los Angeles-based artist whose interdisciplinary practice considers the historical construction of race and the limits of representational systems ranging from lynching photographs to educational museum displays. His widely exhibited Erased Lynching series (ongoing), along with the publication of Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 (Duke University Press, 2006) transformed the understanding of racialized violence in the United States and raised awareness of the lynching of Latinos, Native Americans, Asians, and African-Americans in California, and to see these collective acts of violence within the larger history of policing, anti-immigration movements, and racial terror lynchings.

Gonzales-Day received a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, an MFA from the University of California Irvine, an MA from Hunter College in NYC. He was a Van Lier Fellow in the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program and his work has been widely exhibited: including The J. Paul Getty Museum; LACMA; MOCA; Luis De Jesus Los Angeles; Eastman Museum, Rochester; The Tamayo Museum, Mexico City; The Palais de Tokyo, Paris; The New Museum, CUE Art Foundation, The Kitchen, Jack Shainmann, and El Museo in NYC; The Generali in Vienna; and Thomas Dane Gallery in London, among others. 

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). Jones’s catalogue Queer Communion: Ron Athey (2020), co-edited with Andy Campbell, and which accompanied a retrospective of Athey’s work at Participant Inc. (New York) and ICA (Los Angeles), was listed among Best Art Books 2020 in 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 entitled Lifework: Against Cultural Capitalism addressing creative life in the face of the neoliberalism and structural racism in the Euro-American university and art complex.