Metropolitan Division: Ken Gonzales-Day between the Getty Museum and the LAPD

During his 2008-2009 residency as a Getty Scholar as part of that year's Networks and Boundaries cohort, the Los Angeles artist Ken Gonzales-Day undertook a comprehensive photographic survey of the Getty Museum's and the Getty Villa's portrait busts that would ultimately yield the prize-winning 2011 photobook Profiled. This book explored the role of art and ethnographic museums and their sculptural collections in expressing (and sanctioning) the physiognomic ethos that has long undergirded modern policing's discriminatory practices. In 2015, four of Gonzales-Day's Getty collection photographs joined an array of related pictures in a permanent public installation at the LAPD's new Metro Division police station, and with that gesture these were engaged into a complex negotiation with the latter organization's well-established media program of mobilizing art and visual culture in the service of its own punitive procedural and public relations operations. This considers Gonzales-Day's intervention in light of its entanglement with modern American policing's networks and boundaries of representation, identification, and apprehension.

Keywords: museums ; Photography ; policing ; public art ; race ; sculpture