Erased Lynchings

This group of photographs is based on historic postcards of California lynching victims that circulated in American culture during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To produce these works, Gonzales-Day photographed the original images and then digitally removed the victims. In doing so, he redirected viewers’ attention away from the victim and towards the actions of the perpetrators. Regionally inflected words and phrases like “cowboy justice” and “bandito” printed on the original postcards contextualize these events.

Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art, 2013

These fifteen photographs are digitally altered reproductions of lynching postcards, which were widely circulated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such postcards, meant to instill fear in targeted communities and often inscribed with racist language, were sometimes kept as macabre souvenirs. While lynching is historically associated with the murder of Black people in the American South, this work is based on postcards that come from Western states, where the lynching of Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinx populations has been largely erased from memory. By removing the victims from these images, Ken Gonzales-Day forces the viewer to focus on the white perpetrators of this violence, made mundane through repetition. He challenges us to consider lynching as a widespread trauma and acknowledge its destructive legacy and connection to Western expansion.

Many Wests: Artists Shape an American Idea, 2023

Estas quince fotografías son reproducciones modificadas digitalmente de tarjetas postales de linchamientos, que habían circulado mucho en los siglos XIX y XX. Estas postales, destinadas a infundir miedo en las comunidades destinatarias y, con frecuencia, escritas con lenguaje racista, se guardaban a veces como macabros recuerdos. Aunque el linchamiento se ha asociado históricamente con el asesinato de negros en el sur de los Estados Unidos, esta obra se basa en tarjetas postales procedentes de estados del oeste, donde el linchamiento de indios estadounidenses, asiáticos estadounidenses y poblaciones latinos se ha borrado en gran medida de la memoria. Al borrar de estas imágenes a las víctimas, Ken Gonzales-Day obliga al espectador a centrarse en los perpetradores blancos de esta violencia, convertida en mundana por la repetición. El artista nos desafía a considerar el linchamiento como un trauma generalizado, a reconocer su legado destructivo y su conexión con la expansión occidental.

Más de un oeste: Visiones artísticas de una idea estadounidense, 2023