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Ken Gonzales-Day’s work confronts the role of the visual in conveying history or in history’s absences, including those bodies and spaces deliberately erased, forgotten, or never acknowledged. As illustrated and discussed in Ken Gonzales-Day: History’s “Nevermade,” his photography, films, drawings, and paintings interrogate race and power, questioning how bodies are seen, rendered, or made invisible. His art moves between presence and absence, compelling viewers to confront their own position in relation to systems of oppression and representation.
This volume, accompanying the exhibition of the same name, offers the first comprehensive study of Gonzales-Day’s practice. Organized around his major series, sections of the book—including Rethinking History, Collecting Race, Forging Community, and Redrawing Boundaries— explore how his work engages with archives, bodies, museums, and public space to challenge institutional narratives. Through critical analysis and illustrated throughout, Ken Gonzales-Day: History’s “Nevermade” illuminates the profound political and theoretical stakes of his art.
Essential reading for students, scholars, and practitioners in art history, photography, museum studies, American history, and decolonial and queer studies, this book is a testament to the power of art to reckon with the past and imagine new futures.
List of Figures
Director’s Foreword – Bethany Montagano
Acknowledgments – Amelia Jones
Introduction: Ken Gonzales-Day’s “Nevermade” and the Embodied Reworking of Discourse – Amelia Jones
Section 1: Finding a Path (Early Work)
Introduction to Section 1 – Amelia Jones
1. Finding a Path: Amelia Jones in Dialogue with Ken Gonzales-Day
2. Ken Gonzales-Day Narrative Timeline – Nadia Estrada and Yumu Huo (with Amelia Jones)
Section 2: Rethinking History (Queering/Decolonizing the Family)
Introduction to Section 2 – Amelia Jones
3. Excerpts from Ramoncita Gonzales [aka Ken Gonzales-Day], The Bone Grass Boy: The Secret Banks of the Conejos River (1982) (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1996)
4. The Archive and the Nevermade: Queer, Trans, and Two-Spirit Histories in Ken Gonzales-Day’s Bone-Grass Boy – Ren Heintz
Section 3: Rethinking History (Archives)
Introduction to Section 3 – Amelia Jones
5. The Space Between: The Lynching Project – Ken Gonzales-Day
6. Spectacularizing the Sacrifice: A Reading of the Erased Lynching Series – Cyrielle Lévêque
7. Searching for a Brown Commons: Racial Affect and Re-Enactment in Ken Gonzales-Day’s Lynching Projects – Mary K. Coffey
Section 4: Collecting Race (Skin/Museums)
Introduction to Section 4 – Amelia Jones
8. Race, Whiteness, and Absence in Studio Practice – Ken Gonzales-Day
9. Profiled – Ken Gonzales-Day
10. Different Measures: From Xipe Totec to Facial Recognition to System Overload – Ken Gonzales-Day
11. Metropolitan Division: Ken Gonzales-Day between the Getty Museum and the LAPD – Jason Hill
12. The Profiled Series and Hemispheric Racial Formations – Tatiana Flores
Section 5: Forging Community (Publics)
Introduction to Section 5 – Amelia Jones
13. Bringing Art Out of the Museum – Ken Gonzales-Day
14. Art as Propaganda: Advertising for Racial Equality in Ken Gonzales-Day’s Public Art – Ana Briz
15. Stepping into Memory: Ken Gonzales-Day and the Alternative Los Angeles – Nadia Estrada
Section 6: Imaging Bodies (Portraits)
Introduction to Section 6 – Amelia Jones
16. Queer-ish: Photography and the LGBTQ+ Imaginary – Ken Gonzales-Day
17. Of Life as a Menace and a Shield: The Memento Mori and Pandemic Portrait Series – Taína Caragol
18. Ken Gonzales-Day’s Embodied Brown Historicity: Amelia Jones in Dialogue with Cecilia Fajardo-Hill
Section 7: Redrawing Boundaries (Land)
Introduction to Section 7 – Amelia Jones
19. Another Land / Decolonial Drawings – Ken Gonzales-Day
20. Engaging an Elder and Tracing the Past: Ken Gonzales-Day in Dialogue with Steve Pratt
Contributor Biographies
Ken Gonzales-Day Works
Index