ARTnews and Art in America have chosen the 100 best artworks of the past 25 years, including Professor of Art Ken Gonzales-Day’s The Wonder Gaze: The Lynching of Thomas Thurmond & John Holmes.
The piece is part of Gonzales-Day’s Erased Lynchings project which was first exhibited in 2005 and now includes over 60 images from the US, Mexico, and beyond. Gonzales-Day digitally removed the bodies of lynching victims from historic lynching postcards that were circulated between 1850 to 1935 in order to “resist the revictimization of those killed, and the second to draw attention to the crowd and the social conditions which made such acts possible in the first place,” Gonzales-Day writes about the project.
“Gonzales-Day’s jarring images force viewers to reckon with a form of collective violence that is perpetrated by regular people, frequently with little to no consequences,” an editor for ARTnews says about the work.
Learn more about Gonzales-Day’s project here and see the full list of selected artworks by clicking here.