Driving change: Billboard art project reflects on race and representation

Motorists traveling on I-95 North in New Haven over the next several weeks will pass a new billboard on their right side, and it doesn’t advertise a personal injury lawyer or a fast-food restaurant.

Rather, this Yale-sponsored work of public art contemplates ideas of racial bias and historical memory.

The billboard, which is titled “Composition in Black and Brown I” and will be on view near exit 44 through October, depicts a photographic collage by the Los Angeles-based artist Ken Gonzales-Day. It combines photos of portrait busts and other sculpture from the collections of the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) and Yale Peabody Museum, and prompts questions about the historical constructions of race and modes of representation.

A slightly altered version, “Composition in Black and Brown II,” produced on vinyl, will be on view through December in the windows of the YCBA’s Lower Court at 1104 Chapel Street.

The YCBA, which is closed until next spring while its building undergoes a conservation project, commissioned Gonzales-Day to create the pieces. They are part of his ongoing series “Profiled,” in which he has photographed objects in the collections of more than 40 institutions worldwide to address how racial bias shapes representation in museum settings. 

Both the billboard and the Chapel Street version center two sculptures: To the right is “Bust of a Man,” a portrait of an unknown Black sitter made around 1758 from black limestone in the studio of British sculptor Francis Harwood — who was based in Florence, Italy — and now in the YCBA’s collection. To the left is “Stone Statue of a Young Man,” a Mexica (formerly, “Aztec”) figure carved from gray basalt between 1350 and 1521 C.E. that the Peabody acquired in 1881. Flanking the pair are clusters of white-marble, neoclassical portrait busts of dignitaries from the 18^th and 19^th centuries — aristocrats, statesmen, poets — resembling clouds against the composition’s sky-blue background.

Unlike the sculptures at the center of the composition, the individuals represented in white marble are named and known.

Gonzales-Day, who was a visiting artist at the YCBA in the summer of 2023, recently discussed the two works and his wider project with Martina Droth, the museum’s deputy director and chief curator, during an artist’s talk held in the YCBA’s Lower Court.

The artist, who is queer and Latine, said that his intent is not to critique either museum, but to address the questions he was invited to ask. More broadly, he aims to help all the museums where he’s worked over the course of his series, begun in 2008, to consider the way they represent people and groups who have been excluded from the historical record and in the narratives presented inside museums, he said.

“My goal is to create a better institution where I can find a place… maybe not me, but maybe people after me,” Gonzales-Day said, standing before “Composition in Black and Brown II” in the windows of the Lower Court. “Other generations might grow up with a different experience of the museum as a place in which they belong.”

In photographing museum objects, Gonzales-Day transforms them into subjects of distinct artworks that are open to critique and invite conversation about the ideas and histories they convey, he explained.

“Everybody takes pictures. You all have pictures on your iPhones, but do you think of them as artwork?” he asked the audience at the YCBA. “Generally, not, and, as a result, that protects you. Whereas my artwork puts me in the public eye. It puts me in the crosshairs of critical inquiry, and I do that willingly.”

In accepting the YCBA’s commission, Gonzales-Day says that he knew that he wanted to photograph the Harwood bust, having photographed a slightly different version of it housed in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

“That’s been on my wish list since 2008 when I photographed the other Harwood,” he said.

His photographs reveal differences between the two sculptures. The bust at the YCBA has heart-shaped irises while the version at the Getty has featureless eyes. A scar on the bust’s forehead — evidence that the subject was a real person and not simply an archetypal image of a blackamoor — is more prominent on the sculpture at the YCBA than on the one at the Getty, Gonzales-Day said.

“My goal, of course, is to highlight the qualities of the sculpture that tell me that this is an individual,” he said. “In a lot of the catalog images [of the sculptures], you don’t see those differences.”

His interest in finding an object representing his own racial heritage led him to explore the Peabody’s collection.

In particular, he asked, “where are the Latinos in the collections?” He referenced “White Disc,” a mobile made by American artist Alexander Calder on view at the Yale University Art Gallery, which features white, black, red, and yellow elements, nothing brown. Those colors, and the absence of brown, correspond with a specific set of ideas about racial differences that were popular in the 1950s (when Calder made the sculpture) and that persist through the display of works like “White Disc” in museum galleries today, Gonzales-Day said.

“If you’re a brown person and you never see brown anywhere, if it’s not allowed in high modernist art, that is an absence that I can feel,” he said.   

He discovered the Mexica sculpture while searching the Peabody’s collections online and decided it would represent “Brown” in his compositions. 

Droth noted that Gonzales-Day’s project caused the YCBA and Peabody to reexamine both the Harwood bust and the Mexica statue. Essays on each, penned by Edward Town, the YCBA’s assistant curator of paintings and sculpture, and Brooke Luokkala, former associate registrar for anthropology at the Peabody, and a current Ph.D. candidate at Emory University, provide updated accountings of the sculptures and their provenance. 

In her essay, Luokkala explains that the Mexica sculpture, a nude, had been misidentified as a representation of Xipe Totec, a Mexica god known for wearing the flayed skin of a sacrificial victim. She lays out why this identification was mistaken.

“While most sculptures of Xipe Totec depict him in the nude, they also feature ties up the back and additional sets of hands and feet hanging from the wrists and ankles to indicate that he is wearing a second skin,” Luokkala writes. “It is possible that ‘Stone Statue of a Young Man’ was once dressed as Xipe Totec, but there is no strong evidence to support this possibility.”

In his essay, Town asserts that one can only speculate why Harwood’s patrons commissioned his studio to produce a bust of a Black man.

“While the countenance of the sitter is undeniably dignified and self-possessed, it may have served to normalize Britain’s exploitation of Africans for its eighteenth-century audiences,” Town states. “By alluding to the world of antiquity, it linked Britain’s imperial project to the Roman Empire, of which northern Africa was an integral part. But until more is learned through careful archival research, this object will continue to confound categorization and remain defiantly ambiguous.”