Work from Erased Lynchings.
“The Erased Lynching series is an artist project that was intended to draw attention to the historic absence of Latinx, Asian, Native American victims from the history of lynching in California and has since extended to instances across the nation as a way address the erasure of African American and other histories from institutions of learning across the nation.
The series began with my own research into the history of lynching and culminated with the publication of Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 in 2006. The book and the accompanying art projects emerged in the shadow of James Allen’s Without Sanctuary (2000), and was produced in solidarity with the many scholars working on the history of lynching at that time. Clearly, no artwork can address the horror of lynching in the United States, nor the lasting trauma of lynching on African-Americans and their families. In this context, my project sought to bring attention to the impact of lynching on Latinx communities in California, as well as in our national history.
The erasure was a symbolic gesture, a digital alteration, and a conceptual act. It reflected my artistic decision to not represent the lethal results of racial violence. That is, I wanted to do a project on lynching but I didn’t want to show the victim’s tortured body but instead, to make visible, that the perpetrators in such collective, often premeditated, acts of killing, were (most often) white, organized, and clearly emboldened by their collective presence and shared willingness to reject the democratic principles underlying our judicial system. The only method I could imagine for communicating this idea was to create a body of work that would allow the viewer to focus their attention, not on the victim, but on the crowd itself. The resulting images invited the viewer to consider the setting, the lighting, and the crowd. Some of whom might have been photographed laughing, jeering, and in groups that contained women and children.
I had to imagine a new kind of photographic space, one which drew on conceptual art history but that could also carve out a new space where Latinx histories might also be acknowledged in an art world that rarely included Latinx or Chicanx artists or histories. The conceptual gesture of “erasure” provided a visual solution to something that I saw as a cultural problem, one that had been ignored, and/or created by those historians who had come before me, and therefore required the reframing of this history, though a very different lens. In this project, it would be the artwork which would invite change in a way that historical texts had not. It also required a very different way of thinking about artistic practices and consciously included: research, writing, and a wide range of traditional studio based practices.
As an artist who works with photography, I also had to contend with issues associated with photographic violence as it had been imagined and described by a wide range of critical historians of photography as represented in the works by authors like Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Rosalind Krauss, Alan Sekula, Maurice Berger, Shawn Michelle Smith, and so many others, all of whom encouraged a critical engagement with the photographic image. The project was about racial formation, intersectionality, queerness, and bodies marked by difference, at a time when anti-immigration rhetoric was contributing to deaths and other injustices along the U.S./Mexican border.
Begun in 2002 and first exhibited in 2005, the Erased Lynching Series may be my most recognized work and I believe it has helped to increase the awareness of the history of lynching in California. My research expanded the number of known cases of lynching in the state of California from 50 to over 350 though years of research in archives, pouring over countless rolls of microfilm, and historic accounts. The text also addresses the broader history of lynching in the United States, which, with the help of many scholars, now acknowledges the lynching of over 4400 African Americans (EJI), Asians, Native Americans, and now, for the first time, over 500 Latinx cases in the American West and nationwide. This new research shows that Latinos make up approximately 10% of all lynching cases in the nation.
Formally, I digitally removed the body of the lynching victim and the rope from historic lynching postcards in my collection and other archives. These images are then reproduced at or near original size, as a kind of assisted readymade to stand in for the original. By erasing the victim’s bodies, I sought to create a visual experience that would invite the viewer to see this intentional “absence” in two ways. One as a way resist the revictimization of those killed, and the second to draw attention to the crowd and the social conditions which made such acts possible in the first place. Looking at the crowd, the lighting, the details which remain, one begins to glimpse the underlying mechanisms of racism and bias that were essential to these acts of collective violence, which have increasingly come to be seen as central to our understanding race, racial formation, racial terror, and other forms of violence in America, linked in part, to what the poet Claudia Rankine has termed as the “racial imaginary”.
My project was created in solidarity with, a range of new scholarship that was emerging on lynching in the early 2000s. In addition to this series, “Lynching in the West: 1850-1935” (A John Hope Franklin Center Book) published by Duke University Press drew attention to a region of the nation that was not historically associated with lynching, and also remains one of the the few texts to acknowledge the full extent of lynching in California and across the west.
The series began as a response to anti-immigration/ anti-Latinx rhetoric that led to an increase in violence and vigilante activity against Latinx communities and immigrants arriving along the U.S./Mexico border in the early 2000s. Since then, the series has continued to grow as images were uncovered, and now includes images from across North America, including Mexico, to show the impact of lynching on many BIPOC communities and has expanded our understanding of Lynching in U.S. within a post-colonial context as well. The series now includes over sixty images from across the U.S., Mexico, and beyond. ” – Ken Gonzales-Day
