{"id":3388,"date":"2026-09-20T20:32:07","date_gmt":"2026-09-20T20:32:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.echoartfoundation.com\/ken-gonzales-days-erasures-and-excavations-reframe-the-archive\/"},"modified":"2026-09-20T20:32:07","modified_gmt":"2026-09-20T20:32:07","slug":"ken-gonzales-days-erasures-and-excavations-reframe-the-archive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.echoartfoundation.com\/es\/ken-gonzales-days-erasures-and-excavations-reframe-the-archive\/","title":{"rendered":"Ken Gonzales-Day\u2019s Erasures and Excavations Reframe the Archive"},"content":{"rendered":"

Silver Lake-based photographer and artist Ken Gonzales-Day moves between the subway and the historical record with uncommon precision. At the recently opened Wilshire\/Fairfax station on the Metro D Line, the Concourse Level hosts his installation Urban Excavation: Ancestors, Avatars, Bodhisattvas, Buddhas, Casts, Copies, Deities, Figures, Funerary Objects, Gods, Guardians, Mermaids, Metaphors, Mothers, Possessions, Sages, Spirits, Symbols and Other Objects<\/em>, inspired by glass murals featuring photographic enlargements of more than 70 objects from LACMA\u2019s diverse collections. From there, his practice leads to far darker ground.<\/p>\n

Erasing the spectacle<\/h2>\n

In his book Lynching in the West 1850\u20131935<\/em>, Gonzales-Day shifts attention from Dixie to the American West, noting 354 cases of lynchings in California alone, with victims who were Latinx, First Nations, and Asian Americans. \u201cPart pilgrimage and part memorial, my work has taken me to hundreds of California\u2019s lynch sites, and no matter how pristine or developed these sites may be, my experience of the landscape has been forever transformed,\u201d he writes. He began by photographing lynching sites where few records remain, then digitally removed victims from historic photographs for his 2006 Erased Lynching<\/em> series to avoid \u201cre-victimizing\u201d them.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe images are all photographic but were not made in an analog or \u2018wet\u2019 darkroom… The images have all been digitally processed in Adobe Photoshop or other image-editing software,\u201d Gonzales-Day notes. \u201cI used Photoshop to remove the victim and the rope from each image (when present)… The final digital images were then printed and mounted on heavy card stock to replicate the materiality of historic postcards and view cards to foreground the commodification of their distribution, often via the U.S. Postal system.\u201d Works in this vein include Lynching of Leo Frank, Atlanta, GA., 1915, Erased Lynching Series # 2<\/em>, 2016 (h 4in x w 6.25in), and East First Street #1 (Lynching of Thomas Thurmond & John Holmes, San Jose, CA. 1933), Erased Lynching Series # 1<\/em>, 2006 (6 x 3.6 in). \u201cI would say that many of these killings were racially motivated,\u201d he adds, linking them to \u201cfalse ideas around human difference,\u201d the displacement of Indigenous peoples, settler colonialism, and the history of slavery.<\/p>\n

The crowd in the frame<\/h2>\n

The NAACP documents 4,743 known lynchings in America between 1882 and 1968, centered in the South and the murders of Black children, women, and men. Spectacle was part of the machinery: municipalities hired photographers; \u201clynching picnics\u201d produced souvenir postcards; spectators collected remnants from the scene. A 1915 postcard from Temple, Texas, sent by Joe Meyers and depicting the lynching and burning of William Stanley, read, \u201cThis is the Barbecue we had last night.\u201d In Cairo, IL, the 1909 lynching of William James reportedly drew more than 10,000 spectators, with the victim all but invisible in the surviving crowd image. Gonzales-Day\u2019s erasures, by contrast, redirect attention: \u201cto conceptually redirect the viewer\u2019s attention away from the terrorizing spectacle of lynching and death and to make tangible the complex histories of settler colonialism, systemic racism, the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow laws, anti-Semitism, and whiteness.\u201d<\/p>\n

Seven decades after the 1955 lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, President Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act on March 29, 2022, classifying lynching as a federal hate crime. Gonzales-Day\u2019s work keeps the record in view\u2014and asks who is looking, and why.<\/p>\n

V\u00eda artandcakela.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At Metro\u2019s Wilshire\/Fairfax station, Ken Gonzales-Day presents a glass-mural installation drawn from LACMA\u2019s collections, while his Erased Lynching series removes victims from historical images to examine the spectators, postcards, and systems that sustained the spectacle. His research spans 354 lynchings in California and engages with histories documented by the NAACP and others.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":3387,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-happening-now"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.echoartfoundation.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.echoartfoundation.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.echoartfoundation.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.echoartfoundation.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.echoartfoundation.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3388"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.echoartfoundation.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3388\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.echoartfoundation.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.echoartfoundation.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.echoartfoundation.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.echoartfoundation.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}