Art as Propaganda: Advertising for Racial Equality in Ken Gonzales-Day's Public Art

For nearly two decades, scholar and artist Ken Gonzales-Day has presented his interdisciplinary work in public settings. Beyond the confines of the gallery space, Gonzales-Day often exhibits his research-based photography across and beyond the city of Los Angeles through temporary billboard installations and permanent mural commissions. His interest in uncovering buried histories—such as the forgotten history of lynching in California—and referring to their presence in everyday places through the medium of photography makes it especially important that these images be publicly exhibited in the same local landscapes. By focusing on the activist potential inherent in public art, this essay explores Gonzales-Day's public artworks as advertisements for racial equality. It positions his work as championing a reckoning with the history of racial injustice in the United States, with a span from practices of settler colonialism to today's ongoing violence against BIPOC through racial profiling and police brutality. Through his research-based practice, Gonzales-Day works to foreground and historicize the construction of race to better understand our current historical moment as it pertains to social justice movements such as Black Lives Matter.

Keywords: activist art ; aesthetic evangelism ; artivism ; billboard advertisements ; Black Lives Matter ; Civil Rights ; Eyes on the Prize ; prison abolition ; public advertisement ; public art ; racial imaginary