Overview

This exhibition unites the artistic output of internationally renowned, Los Angeles-based artist Ken Gonzales-Day as both an author and a visual artist. Determined to uncover the little-known history of lynching in the American West, Gonzales-Day researched and compiled the most complete record of lynchings in California focusing on cases that occurred after 1850, the year California established statehood. The resulting research is the foundation for his acclaimed 2006 book, Lynching in the West: 1850-1935. This research, and its haunting emotional impact on the artist, led to the creation of the two interrelated photographic series included in this exhibition: Searching for California’s Hang Trees and Erased Lynching. This presentation at East Los Angeles College marks the first time that Gonzales-Day’s importance as an author and artist are considered in tandem.

Driven by a quest to bear witness to the history of lynching first-hand, Gonzales-Day embarked on a self-directed search for the present-day locations of lynching occurrences. Lynchings, unlike state-sanctioned executions, were the result of vigilante mobs taking the law into their own hands; more often than not, the perpetrators publically displayed their victims in nearby trees. Today many of these hang trees still flourish within the California landscape. As part of Gonzales-Day’s investigation, he mapped the approximate site of these hang trees — a process which involved traveling, over the course of six years, to every county in the state. Through this personal journey and copious amounts of investigation and re-imagining, the artist pays tribute to the hang victims, the majority of which were Latinos living in a region and timeframe commonly referred to as the “Wild West.”

In the series Searching for California’s Hang Trees, the artist photographed hang trees as they appear today in settings ranging from the pastoral to the suburban. Pleasingly picturesque at first glance, and at times even majestic, these images of seemingly benign landscapes are infused with the artist’s projection of long-forgotten sites of aggression. By making the trees the focal point of the series, Gonzales-Day conceptually allows them to function as both surrogates for the absent victims and as witnesses to events thoroughly lacking in our historical consciousness.

This absence of historical knowledge is fully actualized in the Erased Lynching series. In this body of work, the artist manipulated historical postcards that photographically memorialized actual lynchings. These postcards routinely depicted a crowd of (all white) onlookers standing beside a suspended, lifeless body; souvenirs like these were once heavily reproduced and disseminated through the U.S. Postal Service for popular consumption. Gonzales-Day, through a digital sleight of hand, has completely erased the lynching victim’s body from our view. What was once a mob-inducing spectacle — a freshly executed human being suspended from a tree’s limb — is replaced with a haunting and poignant void. The resulting images echo the historical invisibility of the victim, and in a poetic gesture that avoids spectacularizing the body, we refocus our gaze on to the crowd, the photographer, and ultimately, on to ourselves as viewers.

In his compelling work as a photographer, Gonzales-Day confronts the re-presentation of violent tragedies by respectfully yet paradoxically removing the victim’s body. The subtle, deliberate excision of the victim from these images calls our attention to the complex, politically laden mechanisms of historical erasure. Confronted with the inability to resurrect the past, we are tacitly implicated in the absence and reclamation of history.

Marielos Zeka, VPAM Curatorial Assistant