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

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. 

View the artist’s website.

Profiled Gallery Guide

View the PDF 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