PROFILED
A LACMA PAC PRIZE BOOK (LACMA, 2011)
KEN GONZALES-DAY

In this conceptually driven photographic project, Gonzales-Day looks to the depiction of race and the construction of whiteness as points of departure from which to consider the evolution and transformation of Enlightenment ideas about freedom, class, gender, and even the location of the soul, in the depiction of the human form, the portrait bust in particular. Profiled begins after these dated ideologies and their aesthetic manifestations have run their course, but the project is as much about the present as it is the past. Cast, carved, burned, and broken, these are the shadows of people that once lived in this world, or in the imaginations of their makers; they are subtle reminders of the kinds of philosophical, metaphysical, spiritual, legal, and scientific claims that once depended upon appearance alone. This project seeks to integrate these motionless—yet multivalent--forms into the complex history of racial formation. Encompassing everything from memorials of emperors and kings to gods and goddesses, Orientalist follies, and racial typologies—together they provide a new perspective on what it means to be profiled in our own time. Click Here to order.

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LYNCHING IN THE WEST:1850-1935
A JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN BOOK (Duke, 2006)
KEN GONZALES-DAY

There have been many books published on lynching in the United States but only a handful include more than a cursory glance to the Western region of the nation. When they do, the information is usually out of date or inaccurate. Lynching in the West began as an effort to expand the historical record in one of these states, and in doing so, discovered that contrary to the vast majority of published texts and histories on California, that frontier justice and vigilantism were not always a racially neutral set of practices.

The book includes a detailed appendix, assembled by the author, of individual cases of lynching and other forms of public execution. The appended case lists reveals that in California, along with the many persons of Anglo, European, Asian, African, and Native American discent who were lynched, that Latinos of Mexican and Latin American were more likely to be lynched than any other racial, ethnic or national group. The book also considers how eighteenth and nineteenth century theories of race, nationality and ethnicity, may have contributed to this history.

From the vigilance committee to the antilynching movement, lynching touched nearly every community in the United States, and continues to serve as a catalyst for thinking about race, ethnicity, and national identity today. ORDER BOOK