Ken Gonzales-Day

This book, which accompanies an exhibition by the same name, addresses the life work of Ken Gonzales-Day, a Los Angeles based artist, scholar, teacher, and curator who explores race and place in his photographic and filmic works, drawings, and paintings as well as through his research. He achieves this through a fundamental focus on the bodyas intersectionally identified, place-making, empowered, or occludedwhich he centralizes while (in some cases) literally erasing it. When we engage with his work, we engage his body with our bodies; we experience or own situatedness, our intersectionality as we position ourselves and are positioned in social space, always in relations of power. Ken Gonzales-Day: Historys Nevermade puts the artists major series of art works in context, showing the deep political, aesthetic, and theoretical concerns through which he animates his practice and pointing to larger political issues in relation to which each series can be understood. The book is organized in a roughly chronological and thematic structure according to the major series of his work, all of which overlap and interrelate. The sections are: Finding a Path (Early Work), Rethinking History (Family), Rethinking History (Archives), Collecting Race (Museums), Forging Community (Publics), Imaging Bodies (Portraits), Redrawing Boundaries (Land).