April 4, 2012: Ken Gonzales-Day
Posted on February 26, 2012 by School of Art
Ken Gonzales-Day’s interdisciplinary and conceptually grounded projects consider the history of photography, the construction of race, and the limits of representational systems ranging from the lynching photograph to museum display. The Searching for California Hang Trees series offered a critical look at the legacies of landscape photography in the West while his most recent project considers the sculptural depiction of race. Profiled began as an exploration of the influence of eighteenth century “scientific” thought on twenty-first century institutions ranging from the prison to the museum. Using the sculpture and portrait bust collections of several major museums including: The J. Paul Getty Museum, The Field Museum, The Museum of Man in San Diego, L’École des beaux-arts in Paris, The Bode Museum, and Park Sanssouci in Potsdam, among others. Gonzales-Day lives in Los Angeles and is Chair of the Art Department and a Professor at Scripps College.
Grants and fellowships awarded to Gonzales-Day include: COLA; Art Matters; California Communtiy Foundation; Durfee Fondation; Graves Award for the Humanities; Visiting Scholar/Artist-in-Residence, Getty Research Institute; Senior Fellow, American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution; Fellow, Rockefeller Foundation Study and Conference Center, Bellagio, Italy; Fellow, ISP, Whitney Museum of American Art.