Latinx Futurisms in (Public) Space
Figure 1. Ken Gonzales-Day, Detail, Urban Excavation: Ancestors, Avatars, Bodhisattvas, Buddhas, Casts, Copies, Deities, Figures, Funerary Objects, Gods, Guardians, Mermaids, Metaphors, Mothers, Possessions, Sages, Spirits, Symbols, and Other Objects (detail), 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. Commissioned by LACMTA (Metro)
Ancient figures surround Figurine Whistle of Seated Elite Female with Cranial Deformation, Facial Scarification, and Forehead Jewel (600-900 CE) from Northern Guatemala or Southern Mexico. Male Figure (AD 450-650) from Mexico is at the top. Standing Figure from Veracruz (A.D. 600-900), Seated Figure (1400-950 B.C) from Tlatilco culture, and Standing Male Figure (200 B.C. – A.D. 500) from Jalisco are on the left. Seated Male Figure (200 B.C – A.D. 300) from Jalisco, Seated Toothless Man with Protruding, Wrinkled Belly (Aged God?) (300-600 CE), verso of Standing Male Figure (200 B.C. – A.D. 500) on the right are contained by a luminous sphere of blue light. They represent the past but they also represent the present though my practice as a Latinx artist working in Los Angeles. They bend and curve as if pulled by unseen forces and make up one small detail of a much larger work that was constructed from hundreds of photographs I took at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and digitally combined into two photographic murals measuring 10.6’ x 66’ and 10.6’ x 120’ each.
The final work will be printed on over 400 glass panels and permanently installed along the walls of an underground concourse in an L.A. Metro station that has been tunneled out from under the streets of Los Angeles. The station is located near the intersection of Wilshire Blvd. and Fairfax Ave. and will serve an area known as The Museum Mile that includes LACMA, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, the La Brea Tar Pits & Museum, The Craft Contemporary, and the Petersen Automotive Museum, among other attractions.
Titled Urban Excavation: Ancestors, Avatars, Bodhisattvas, Buddhas, Casts, Copies, Deities, Figures, Funerary Objects, Gods, Guardians, Mermaids, Metaphors, Mothers, Possessions, Sages, Spirits, Symbols, and Other Objects, the work is composed of objects from many cultures and were chosen because they spoke to the idea of transformation—between states of being and cultures, intersectionality—and also to invite a dialogue around issues of colonialism, the field of art history, and naming conventions, reflected in an artistic intervention into the Los Angeles public transit system.
The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (L.A. Metro) launched The Metro Vision 2028 Plan as a comprehensive approach to transform the city’s mobility future. LA Metro is one of the fastest growing transit systems in the United States and serves more than 9.6 million people within its service area.¹ The Purple (D Line) Extension will feature eight new stations along the Wilshire Corridor and is one of many projects scheduled to open across the city in preparation to host the 2028 Olympics.²
When coming up with a proposal, I was struck by the tar blackened fossils at the La Brea Tar Pits & Museum. I saw the museum as a kind of time portal. Given our collective dependence on fossil fuels and their history in shaping the city, I wanted to imagine the space as another kind of portal, that would engage with the past but that could also have the potential to transform how we see the future.
Figure 2. Ken Gonzales-Day, Museum staff (PACMA) removing works from storage to be photographed, 2018.
I began by playfully asking myself: what if the county's major museums sank into the very same tar deposits that had trapped so many Ice Age animals in present day Hancock Park (where the Tar Pits & Museum are located). I wondered what visitors of the future would learn about us from the objects found here. What story would these objects tell them about our own time?
I then began to “excavate” or photograph works from LACMA’s permanent collection and incorporated the images into my design (see Figure 2). I chose LACMA’s collection because, just as Metro transports riders across the county, it transports visitors across time and space through its rotating exhibitions and encyclopedic collection that includes more than 150,000 works from the ancient world to the present. Indeed, much of the collection originates in far-off places and comes from vastly different historical periods from our own.
The final piece, still in production, suggests that through the study of objects and the histories they represent, or exclude, we can learn much. After all, the objects in our museums are not just tar-blackened fossils, but the works of artists, craftsmen, and communities, who gave form to these precious objects for a wide array of individual and collective goals. The artworks chosen for the installation speak to the histories of conflict, conquest, and settler colonialism, here and elsewhere. They also draw on the work museums and scholars have done on collecting practices, object provenance, and issues around cultural sensitivity. I worked closely with museum curators and staff to select examples from as many departments as possible and discussed the work in public forums. I imagined this installation, visually similar to the Constellation Series installation (Figure 3), as providing riders a way to engage with the museum’s collections before, during, or after their visit.
Figure 3. Ken Gonzales-Day, Constellations (included in El Museo del Barrio’s curated Section for Freize Art Fair, 2019). Courtesy of Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.
Entering the installation from below ground, visitors will see European figures as almost black at first glance but upon closer investigation, black metal will give way to human forms; twisted, melted, and transformed through digital manipulation.
The viewer will begin to recognize objects from LACMA’s collection:. European figures of Hercules by Antonio Canova or Guillaume Boichot; a bronze of Mars by Hendrick de Keyser; or a Philopoemen by Pierre-Jean David d’Angers, all of which point to the mythology of violence, conquest, and slavery in the ancient world.
Moving toward the light of the street entrance, bronze works by Auguste Rodin from the B. Gerald Cantor Art Foundation include Eve, Shade, and Nude Study of Jean d’Aire, and suggest more eggetarian goals in keeping with the aspirations of the modern era, particularly when paired with Francois Rude’s triumphant Genius of Liberty (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Francois Rude, Genius of Liberty. Photo by Ken Gonzales-Day
Historic and mythological figures from the west give way to other more protective figures, like the small netsuke Mermaid from Japan, the Amida Buddha, or even a small carved figure from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Breaking from this dark mass, new groups begin to emerge and distinguish themselves from one another. There are several groupings made from burial figurines from Colima, Nayarit, and Jalisco on Mexico’s Pacific Coast that may speak to the Latinx community. Clustered in what appear to be floating constellations, the darkness gives way to light as passengers move from train to street, from darkness to light.
The viewer, the student, the worker, or the tourist may each find different relationships in and between the works. Equivalences may lessen as differences emerge and viewers may begin to identify an object, figure, or grouping, and consider new relationships. There are spiritual figures, relics, copies of copies, and so much more. Each was witnessed, photographed, and incorporated at a monumental scale.
The selection grew out of an initial examination of 4,455 sculptural objects from LACMA’s collection available online. They represent a wide range of objects from the museum’s encyclopedic collection and include works from many of its collection areas including African Art, Ancient Americas, Art of the Pacific, Chinese and Korean Art, Egyptian Art, European Sculpture, Japanese Art, South and Southeast Asian Art.
LA Metro staff then facilitated access to LACMA’s curatorial staff.
Rita Gonzalez, Head of Contemporary Art, and Jennifer Cernada, Curatorial Assistant, began working with me and the museum’s curators to determine a final selection of objects in consultation with conservation staff, and in keeping with my initial interest in figures that might be seen to signify, aid, or mark transformation in some way; for example, the mermaid that protected Japanese fishermen, or the funerary object that accompanied the departed to the next world.
Thematically, the murals can also be seen as an extension of Afro-Latinx and Indigenous Futurisms and are literally being created for future riders.³
Afrofuturism has been described as a “wide-ranging social, political and artistic movement that strives to imagine a world where African-descended peoples and their cultures play a central role in in the creation of that world.”⁴ Others have described Afrofuturism as the intersection of “imagination, technology, the future, and liberation.”⁵ Afro- and Latinx Futurism are increasingly recognized as linked through their embrace of anti-racist, decolonial, indigenous, Latinx, and mestizaje positionalities.⁶
In 2001, I wrote an essay entitled “Choloborg: or, the disappearing Latino Body” for Art Journal, a publication of the College Art Association. The editorial content of this issue was curated by Amelia Jones, a feminist curator, theorist, and historian of art and performance. At the time, I saw the essay as an intervention (which would include the creation of the cover image) into the academic art world and I now see it as a part of the history of Afro-Latinx futurism.
Ken Gonzales-Day, # 132, Dysmorphology Series, 2001
The essay borrows from Donna Haraway’s 1985 essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” in which she presented the cyborg and technology as a part of a new Feminist paradigm to draw attention to the radical potential of those identities formulated outside of existing power structures. She wrote, “Monsters have always defined the limits of community in Western imaginations,” and one is of course reminded of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), which many now see as the first true science-fiction story. Using Haraway’s invocation of the cyborg as a prompt, I wanted to extend her argument to include queer Latinx bodies, like my own, in what I saw as a partial response to the ongoing anti-immigration rhetoric of the period, and which would only increase after 9/11 later that year. For me, “Choloborg” presented the reclaiming of the image of the renegade—the Cholo, the queer—combined with digital technology, to mark a power shift in representation that was potentially as radical or progressive as Haraway’s cyborg. The image also appeared on the Journal’s cover. To create the image, I altered a series of lens-based images in Photoshop to invoke a kind of digital glitch or stutter. Today, many scholars recognize such an intersectional puncture as decolonial, queer, digital, dystopic, and fundamentally linked to Afro-Latinx Futurism.
Entitled Urban Excavation, the L.A. Metro murals depict a very different notion of time. Like the metaverse, where many of the objects float freely and collide, the pieces embrace different cultures and periods. There are figures that have been seen as both works of art and as ancestors. Others have functioned as avatars, spiritual figures, mythical figures, and deities. Some were funerary objects, or represented gods, guardians, and spirits. Still others might be characterized as signifiers of a transition between states as part of a spiritual practice. As a Latinx artist in a city and state where we continue to be underrepresented, I was drawn to represent at least part of my cultural heritage. Many of these objects are rarely on view in the physical world of the museum. I wanted to record them, at this time, to invite their presence in a shared space below the earth. The work is a portal, through which all may travel, from the past to future, or from darkness to light. The journey is up to them.
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Footnotes
¹ Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) website, July 24, 2022.
² Additional information can be found on the Metro webpage for the Purple (D Line) Extension Transit Project at https://www.metro.net/projects/westside
³ Catherine Sue Ramírez, PhD., first introduced the term Chicanfutuism in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies in 2004 as an extension of Latinx Futurism.
⁴ Delan Bruce, Afrofuturism: From the Past to the Living Present, UCLA Newsroom, https://newsroom.ucla.edu/magazine/afrofuturism , July 25, 2022.
⁵ Ibid.
⁶ The station is scheduled to open in 2024 as part of the Section 1.
Ken Gonzales-Day's interdisciplinary and conceptually grounded projects consider the history of photography, the construction of race, and the limits of representational systems from lynching photography to museum displays. Gonzales-Day’s work has been exhibited internationally and is in the permanent collections of the Getty, LACMA, MoCA, École des Beaux Arts (Paris), Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, and American Art Museum, among others. His monographs include Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 (Duke) and Profiled (LACMA, 2011). Gonzales-Day has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and awards from Creative Capital, California Community Foundation, COLA, Art Matters and holds the Fletcher Jones Chair in Art and Professor at Scripps College. He is represented by Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.
To learn more, visit: www.kengonzalesday.com