Rate My Professor Ken Gonzales-Day

Ken Gonzales-Day is Professor of Art and Fletcher Jones Chair in Art at Scripps College in Claremont, California. He holds a B.F.A. in Painting from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York; an M.A. in Art History from Hunter College, City University of New York; and an M.F.A. in Studio Art from the University of California, Irvine. His interdisciplinary and conceptually grounded projects examine the history of photography, the construction of race, and the limits of representational systems, ranging from lynching photographs to museum displays. The Searching for California Hang Trees series provides a critical examination of the legacies of landscape photography in the West, while the Profiled series documents sculptural depictions of race through photographs from collections at institutions including the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Field Museum in Chicago, L'Ecole des beaux-arts in Paris, the Bode Museum in Berlin, and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery and American Art Museum.

Gonzales-Day previously served as Chair of the Art Department from 2006-2008 and 2009-2014, and as Chair of Art and Art History from 2003-2006. His fellowships and awards include the 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography, Chercheur Accueilli at the Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art, COLA Individual Artist Award, Art Matters Grant, Mid-Career Award from the California Community Foundation, Durfee Foundation ARC Grant, Graves Award for the Humanities, Visiting Scholar and Artist-in-Residence at the Getty Research Institute, Senior Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery, Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy, and Van Lier Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program. Key publications include Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 (Duke University Press, 2006) and Profiled (LACMA, 2011). His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at venues such as Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, the USC Fisher Museum of Art, Yale Center for British Art, and the National Portrait Gallery.