Holiday clips: Ken Gonzales-Day

The Modern Art Notes Podcast

Episode No. 675 is a holiday weekend clips episode featuring artist Ken Gonzales-Day.

The Yale Center for British Art is presenting "Ken Gonzales-Day: Composition in Black and Brown" a two-part public art project informed by Gonzales-Day's investigation of YCBA's collections. Both works, a billboard along Interstate 95 in West Haven, Conn., and a site-specific vinyl work on the museum, feature Gonzales-Day's interrogations of historical constructions of race and the limits of representation. The billboard is on view into October 2024; the work at YCBA is on view until December 2024.

Gonzales-Day’s work considers the historical construction of race and the limits of representational systems, such as photographs of lynchings and museum displays. His book “Lynching in the West: 1850-1935” expanded our understanding of racialized violence in the United States through the discovery of photographs of lynchings of Latinos, Native Americans, Asians and African-Americans in California. His work has been the subject of solo or two-person exhibitions at museums such as the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

This episode was taped in 2021 on the occasion of Gonzales-Day's inclusion in at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. For images, see Episode No. 498.