Ken Gonzales-Day: Afterlife / Luis de Jesus Los Angeles
- LA Art Documents
- 3 days ago
- 1 min read
Ken Gonzales-Day: Afterlife
Luis de Jesus Los Angeles
November 8 - December 20, 2025
Known for his conceptually driven photography and his investigations into race and historical memory, Gonzales-Day presents a new body of work that underscores the vital role of museum collections in celebrating the breadth of human experience. Drawing on his own cultural influences, he brings together objects from the Mexica and broader Mesoamerican traditions with those from Europe, Africa and Asia, foregrounding his intersectional perspective as a Queer Latinx artist. The exhibition's title, Afterlife, evokes the enduring afterlife of cultural objects, as both artistic expressions and historical artifacts within a larger cultural framework, while challenging the traditional narratives presented in museums.
Over the past 20 years, Gonzales-Day has photographed objects in museum collections and digitally reassembled them into new works. By combining these objects, Gonzales-Day creates playful and sometimes haunting images that are both timely and timeless, encouraging us to see our interconnectedness. The exhibition’s central piece, a large-scale photographic mural titled Xipe Totec with Busts, brings together images of busts of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, and Susan B. Anthony (photographed during his residency at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery) with Mexica and Mesoamerican objects, set amongst a deathly pile of skulls from the Museum of Criminal Anthropology in Turin. The work may incite reflection on the precarious state of museums and the battles being fought on both the cultural and global fronts.
