Ken Gonzales-Day Profiled
Profiled Series: Untitled: Bust of an African Woman by Henry Weeks; marble, 1859; The J. Paul Getty Museum. Los Angeles and Bust of Mm. Adélaïde Julie Mirleau de Newville, née Garnier d'Isle by Jean-Baptiste Pigalle; marble, 1750s; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2009 (printed 2017); Edition of 5 Archival ink on rag paper; 32 x 61 inches
In the Gallery
April 26 - May 28, 2021
Virtual Lecture
Time: May 11, 2021 05:30 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://wlu.zoom.us/j/97665882246
Meeting ID: 976 6588 224
About The Exhibition
In his Profiled project, artist and art historian, Ken Gonzales-Day has mined the collections of established museums such as J. Paul Getty and the Smithsonian, among others, photographing portrait busts in an exploration of Western assumptions about beauty and human value through the material legacies of slavery, colonialism, and white privilege. Gonzales-Day is an internationally known artist based in Los Angeles where he is a professor of art at Scripps College. His conceptual, research-based practice focuses on historically constructed systems of race and the limits of representational systems.
Visit the artist's website: https://kengonzalesday.com/
Virtual Tour
Click here to view the virtual tour.
Virtual Tour navigation:
- Select a wall to explore.
- Click and drag the image to pan around the room.
- Hover over and click on each piece for a closer view and label information (title, date, medium, etc).
- These views and the label windows can be closed by clicking the X in the upper right corner.
- The series that is comprised of several pieces is presented in a slideshow format, which can be advanced using the arrows on either side of the pop-up window.
Profiled Gallery Guide
Written by the students in Professor Andrea Lepages’s 2021 Spring Term class Chicanx and Latinx Art and Muralism: From the Street to (Staniar) Gallery
Working in collaborative groups, students researched Gonzales-Day’s artwork to produce a series of themes that would provide a broad context for the study of the artworks on view in the Staniar: communication, profiling, discrimination, consent, categorization, and the pseudoscience of physiognomy. Students wrote a series of essays that they revised carefully during the term. A few of the students enrolled in the course were art history majors or minors, but the vast majority were writing their first art history paper. To the material, these first-years, sophomores, juniors, and seniors brought a wide range of expertise from art history to Latin American and Caribbean Studies to sociology. They were encouraged to find ways to bring to bear their out-of-class interests on the artwork on display—whether coursework in economics, business administration, Spanish, or interests in music, museums, and the environment. Building on their selected themes, students developed a series of interview questions for Gonzales-Day. Prioritizing close listening, the students worked to produce edited transcriptions of each interview, hopefully introducing into the archival record new information about the artist and his artwork. ----Professor Andrea Lepage, from Introduction to educational gallery guide term project