Amelia Jones in conversation with Ken Gonzales-Day & Paul Mpagi Sepuya

Ken Gonzales-Day and Paul Mpagi Sepuya are world-renowned for their art works addressing queer desire and queer histories in photography, and both are featured in solo shows up in Los Angeles, fall 2025. Please join them, with moderator Amelia Jones (curator of Ken Gonzales-Day: History’s “Nevermade” currently up at the USC Fisher Museum), for this public discussion on the power and limits of queer photography.

In partnership with ONE Archives, USC Fisher Museum of Art, and cosponsored 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. Sepuya’s first exhibition to focus exclusively on his works on paper, Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Excerpts & Fragments includes a rarely displayed archive of his early zines, the debut of Sepuya’s complete collection of artist books and a selection of collages. The show also features a site-specific facade installation commissioned for the exhibition 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Gonzales-Day coined the term “nevermade” to describe imagined historical documents—works that challenge who writes history, what is included, and what is left out.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.

FEATURED SPEAKERS:

(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.

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 (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.

Moderator:

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.

USC is committed to making its events accessible to individuals with disabilities. If you need accommodations to participate in this event, you may contact us at Z2FsaWNpYW0gfCB1c2MgISBlZHU= or 213-740-4561.

Individuals requiring accommodations or auxiliary aids, such as sign language interpreters/real-time captioners and alternative format materials are asked to notify us at least seven days prior to the event. Every reasonable effort will be made to provide accommodations in an effective and timely manner

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