Join us for a panel discussion on the complex history of museums' collections and their significant role in shaping the narratives around race and identity in the United States and Europe. Speakers will explore the issues raised in Ken Gonzales-Day’s work, with a focus on the Profiled and the Constellation series, offering a critical examination of both art and natural history museums’ collecting practices. The works in both of these series explore the collecting, research, and classification practices within Western museums, questioning the role of these institutions in the development of cultural beliefs about race and racial hierarchies in Europe and the U.S. Gonzales-Day's photographs challenge the traditional narratives within museums and how they interpret and present cultural artifacts.

FEATURED SPEAKERS:

Ken Gonzales-Day is a Los Angeles-based artist whose interdisciplinary practice considers the historical construction of race and the limits of representational systems ranging from lynching photographs to educational museum displays. His widely exhibited Erased Lynching series (ongoing), along with the publication of Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 (Duke University Press, 2006) transformed the understanding of racialized violence in the United States and raised awareness of the lynching of Latinos, Native Americans, Asians, and African-Americans in California, and to see these collective acts of violence within the larger history of policing, anti-immigration movements, and racial terror lynchings.

Gonzales-Day received a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, and an MA from Hunter College in NYC. He was a Van Lier Fellow in the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program and his work has been widely exhibited: including The J. Paul Getty Museum; LACMA; MOCA; Luis De Jesus Los Angeles; Eastman Museum, Rochester; The Tamayo Museum, Mexico City; The Palais de Tokyo, Paris; The New Museum, CUE Art Foundation, The Kitchen, Jack Shainmann, and El Museo in NYC; The Generali in Vienna; and Thomas Dane Gallery in London, among others.

Tatiana Flores is the Jefferson Scholars Foundation Edgar F. Shannon, Jr. distinguished professor of art history at the University of Virginia. A scholar and curator of modern and contemporary Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx art, she authored the award-winning article “‘Latinidad Is Cancelled’: Confronting an Anti-Black Construct” (2021). She curated the critically acclaimed exhibition Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, which toured five venues from 2017 to 2019, for the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative and was director for the Rutgers Center for Women in the Arts, where she oversaw several exhibitions and convened major programs, including the 2023 conference Art, Gender, and Disability, which received major support from the Ford Foundation.

Luke Fidler is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Southern California, where his research focuses on the art, material culture, and political economy of medieval Europe. He is currently working on a book about sculpture's ambivalent relationship to forms of coercion in the twelfth century; his medieval scholarship has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, The Art Bulletin, Critical Inquiry, Gesta, Representations, and RES. His writing about contemporary art and social movements has appeared in many venues, including ASAP/Journal and The Brooklyn Rail. Committed to building more emancipatory futures for art history, he has taught with the Odyssey Project in Chicago and at Stateville Correctional Center as a member of the Prison+Neighborhood Arts/Education Project.

Fidler received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2022 and previously managed the Mellon-funded "Visualizing Abolition" project at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His scholarship has also been supported by a wide range of organizations, including the Paul Mellon Centre, the Henry Moore Foundation, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. During the 2025-26 academic year, he is a fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.

Moderator:

Amelia Jones is the Robert A. Day Professor and Vice Dean of Faculty and Research at the Roski School of Art & Design, USC, and is a curator and scholar of contemporary art, performance, and feminist and sexuality studies. Recent publications include Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (2012); a volume co-edited with Erin Silver, Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories (2016); and the edited special issue “On Trans/Performance” of “Performance Research” (2016). Jones’s catalogue Queer Communion: Ron Athey (2020), co-edited with Andy Campbell, and which accompanied a retrospective of Athey’s work at Participant Inc. (New York) and ICA (Los Angeles), was listed among Best Art Books 2020 in the New York Times. Her 2021 book, entitled In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance, explores the history of performance art and queer theory since the 1950s, from a queer feminist point of view. She is currently working on a book entitled Lifework: Against Cultural Capitalism, addressing creative life in the face of neoliberalism and structural racism in the Euro-American university and art complex.

USC is committed to making its events accessible to individuals with disabilities. If you need accommodations to participate in this event, you may contact us at [email protected] or 213-740-4561.

Individuals requiring accommodations or auxiliary aids, such as sign language interpreters/real-time captioners and alternative format materials, are asked to notify us at least seven days prior to the event. Every reasonable effort will be made to provide accommodations in an effective and timely manner