Ken Gonzales-Day

History’s “Nevermade”

Buch | Softcover

408 Seiten

2025
Intellect Books (Verlag)
978-1-83595-137-8 (ISBN)

Artikel merken

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.

Amelia Jones is Robert A. Day Professor and Vice Dean at Roski School of Art & Design, USC, Los Angeles, USA. Recent publications include the catalogue Queer Communion: Ron Athey (2020), co-edited with Andy Campbell (accompanying a retrospective of Athey’s work, which she curated); and In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance (2021).

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

Erscheinungsdatum	26.07.2025
Zusatzinfo	149 Halftones, black and white; 123 Halftones, color
Sprache	englisch
Maße	170 x 240 mm
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Fotokunst
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Malerei / Plastik
ISBN-10	1-83595-137-6 / 1835951376
ISBN-13	978-1-83595-137-8 / 9781835951378
Zustand	Neuware