On Queer Photography

Ken Gonzales-Day and Paul Mpagi Sepuya are Los Angeles based artists who are renowned for addressing queer desire and queer histories in their work. This fall, both artists have solo exhibitions in Los Angeles. To mark the occasion, please join Gonzales-Day and Sepuya, with moderator Amelia Jones (curator of Ken Gonzales-Day: History’s “Nevermade” currently up at the USC Fisher Museum), for a public discussion on the power and limits of queer photography, a topic with special urgency given the current repression of political speech and queer representation in the US.

In partnership with ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, USC Fisher Museum of Art, and co-sponsored by Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND).

This program is presented in connection with the exhibitions:

Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Excerpts & Fragments, on view from November 8 - December 21, 2025, at 2413 Hyperion Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90027. Curated by Christopher Mangum-James, LAND's deputy director, the exhibition brings together twenty years of Los Angeles-based artist Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s zines, artist books, and collages. The first exhibition to focus exclusively on these works, Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Excerpts & Fragments includes an archive of his early zines, his complete, never-before-seen collection of artist books, and a selection of collages. The exhibition also features a site-specific facade installation commissioned for the building that can be experienced at all hours.

Ken Gonzales-Day: History's "Nevermade" on view through March 14, 2026, at USC Fisher Museum of Art, 823 W Exposition Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90089. Curated by Amelia Jones, Robert Day Professor and Vice Dean of Faculty and Research at the USC Roski School of Art & Design. Ken Gonzales-Day: History’s “Nevermade” is the first mid-career survey of the Los Angeles–based artist, scholar, and educator. Spanning more than 30 years and featuring over 100 works, the exhibition brings together Gonzales-Day’s photographs, drawings, paintings, video, and research to explore cultural memory, race, and place in the United States.

Gonzales-Day coined the term “nevermade” to describe imagined historical documents—works that challenge who writes history, what is included, and what is left out. The exhibition traces his career through seven thematic sections: from early drawings and student works, to investigations of lynching in the American West, to deconstructions of racial bias in museum collections, collaborative portraits responding to moments of crisis, public artworks, and recent series reexamining colonial-era landscapes and archives.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982, San Bernardino, CA) is a Los Angeles-based artist working in photography whose projects weave together histories and possibilities of portraiture, queer and homoerotic networks of production and collaboration, and the material and conceptual potential of blackness at the heart of the medium.

Sepuya has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; Blaffer Art Museum, Houston; Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, England; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha. He is an Associate Professor in Media Arts at the University of California, San Diego.

Sepuya's work resides in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Tate, London; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Baltimore Museum of Art, among others. Sepuya is represented by Vielmetter Los Angeles, DOCUMENT Chicago, Bortolami Gallery, New York, and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich and Paris.

Ken Gonzales-Day is a Los Angeles-based artist whose interdisciplinary practice considers the historical construction of race and the limits of representational systems ranging from lynching photographs to educational museum displays. His widely exhibited Erased Lynching series (ongoing), along with the publication of Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 (Duke University Press, 2006) transformed the understanding of racialized violence in the United States and raised awareness of the lynching of Latinos, Native Americans, Asians, and African-Americans in California, and to see these collective acts of violence within the larger history of policing, anti-immigration movements, and racial terror lynchings.

Gonzales-Day received a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, and an MA from Hunter College in NYC. He was a Van Lier Fellow in the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program and his work has been widely exhibited: including The J. Paul Getty Museum; LACMA; MOCA; Luis De Jesus Los Angeles; Eastman Museum, Rochester; The Tamayo Museum, Mexico City; The Palais de Tokyo, Paris; The New Museum, CUE Art Foundation, The Kitchen, Jack Shainmann, and El Museo in NYC; The Generali in Vienna; and Thomas Dane Gallery in London, among others.

Amelia Jones is the Robert A. Day Professor at the Roski School of Art & Design at USC, a curator and scholar of contemporary art, performance, and feminist and sexuality studies. Recent publications include Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (2012); a volume co-edited with Erin Silver, Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories (2016); and the edited special issue “On Trans/Performance” of “Performance Research” (2016). Jones’s catalogue Queer Communion: Ron Athey (2020), co-edited with Andy Campbell, and which accompanied a retrospective of Athey’s work at Participant Inc. (New York) and ICA (Los Angeles), was listed among Best Art Books 2020 in the New York Times. Her 2021 book, entitled In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance, explores the history of performance art and queer theory since the 1950s, from a queer feminist point of view. She is working on a book entitled Lifework: Against Cultural Capitalism, addressing creative life in the face of neoliberalism and structural racism in the Euro-American university and art complex.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Excerpts & Fragments is presented by Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND) and curated by Christopher Mangum-James, LAND deputy director.

Lead support is provided by 2413 Hyperion. Major support is provided by Michael Breland and Peter Harper, Sherry and Joel McKuin, and Abby Pucker. Generous support is provided by Bernard I. Lumpkin and Carmine D. Boccuzzi. Additional support is provided by Peter Alexander and Scott Craig, Alan Hergott and Curt Shepard, the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council, and Samuel Vasquez. In-kind support is provided by Special Offer, Inc.

Special thanks to Geraldine Chung, Heather Manzutto, Oscar Peña, Collina Strada, and Vielmetter Los Angeles.

LAND’s 2025 projects are made possible with lead support from the Offield Family Foundation, the Jerry and Terri Kohl Family Foundation, and The Perenchio Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Fran and Ray Stark Foundation, Ben Weyerhaeuser, the Patrick and Aimee Butler Family Foundation, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture, Brenda Potter, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and LAND’s Nomadic Council.

Commissions are supported by the LAND Artist Fund with major funding provided by Karyn Kohl. Generous funding is provided by Berry Stein and The Goodman Family Foundation.

LAND is a member of and supported by the Los Angeles Visual Arts (LAVA) Coalition.

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