Golden Chain, 2014

These photographs by Ken Gonzales-Day belong to his ‘Searching for California’s Hang Trees’ series, an intensive research- based project for which the artist spent six years scrolling through microfilm, reading historical accounts of the “frontier,” and poring through old newspapers from 1850 to 1935. First undertaken to research the violence to which Mexicans and Latinx people across the Southwest were subjected in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it morphed into a mapping project. Gonzales-Day ultimately identified 350 individual cases of lynching in California and discovered that 37% of victims in the period of his study were Latinx. The project then became one of witnessing: Gonzales-Day ventured out with his camera to all of the lynching sites he had located, attempting to create remembrances of this too-often forgotten history. In this way, the resultant images function simultaneously as documentation of the artist’s pilgrimages, landscape photographs, historical records, and social commentary.