Titus Kaphar

If we don’t amend history by making new images and new representations, we are always going to be excluding ourselves. —Titus Kaphar Painter, sculptor, filmmaker, and installation artist Titus Kaphar confronts history by dismantling classical structures and styles of visual representation in Western art, which, in turn, subverts centuries of art historical traditions. Dislodging entrenched narratives from their status as “past” to comprehend their impact on the present, he exposes the conceptual underpinnings of contested nationalist histories and colonialist legacies and reveals how they have served to manipulate both cultural and personal identity. Through the deconstructive techniques of cutting, shredding, stitching, binding, and erasing both subject and support, Kaphar reconstructs new codes and modalities that reckon on Black possibilities. In Yet Another Fight for Remembrance (2014), he used thick white brushstrokes to obscure the gesturing bodies of a group of African American men in the “Hands up, don’t shoot” position, and then repainted their outlines in black to reassert their formal presence. Thus, the painting process itself became the embodiment of the ongoing struggle for social visibility and recognition. During his 2017 TED Talk, Kaphar performed, onstage, the whitewashing of his large-scale painting Shifting the Gaze (2017) . Based on Frans Hals’s Family Group in a Landscape (1645–48), which portrays a wealthy Dutch family and their African servant, Kaphar’s version covered the family group with white paint, shifting attention entirely to the presence of this young servant. Kaphar’s art addresses salient social and political concerns, but it also springs from his own life story. For example, his search for information about his estranged father, Jerome, led to an ongoing multimedia exploration of the criminal justice system called The Jerome Project (2014–). This series of portraits began with Kaphar’s online discovery of the mug shots of ninety-seven imprisoned African American men who share his father’s first and last names. He paints gilded portraits of each man in the style of Byzantine devotional icons, and then dips them in tar. Initially, the depth to which each painting was immersed in tar corresponded to the time that each subject had spent behind bars; in later paintings, this has increased to represent the longer-term implications of social silencing that results from their incarceration. In the work Behind the Myth of Benevolence (2014) and the series Seeing Through Time (2017–), Kaphar instrumentalizes the visual strategies and methods of European classicists such as Jacques-Louis David, Théodore Géricault, and Diego Velázquez to rewrite the narratives of cultural empowerment with Black subjects. And just as historical conditions prompted artists of the twentieth century to generate radical aesthetic modes—consider the traumatic inspiration of the Second World War for artists globally, from Pablo Picasso and Alberto Burri to Ibrahim El-Salahi and Norman Lewis—so is Kaphar’s subject matter responsive to the anxieties of present-day America. In his From a Tropical Space paintings (2019–), he creates surreal, emotionally intense landscapes that are firmly rooted in the present, drawing on his exhaustive study of nineteenth-century painting techniques. The saturated, artificial coloration of the suburban environments against which women and the silhouettes of their absent children are set complicates and adds tension to these enigmatic genre scenes. Coincident with renewed sociopolitical energies within the broader practice of figurative painting, Kaphar’s images resonate with the turbulent and uncertain times in which we live. Released in 2022, Kaphar’s documentary short film Shut Up and Paint confronts institutional issues of audiences and activism in the context of the art market. In 2023, Kaphar wrote and directed his first narrative feature, Exhibiting Forgiveness (released theatrically in 2024), as a fictionalized extension of The Jerome Project . Paintings of figures, objects, and neighborhood houses that Kaphar made before the production are incorporated into the film as symbols of family, community, memory, and intergenerational reconciliation. Key to Kaphar’s representation by Gagosian is the gallery’s substantive support for NXTHVN (pronounced “next haven”), a nonprofit arts hub that Kaphar founded with Jason Price and Jonathan Brand in 2015 in the Dixwell neighborhood of New Haven, Connecticut. Nurturing creative talent within and beyond the local community, NXTHVN offers fellowships, residencies, and other professional development opportunities to artists, curators, and students. Housed in two repurposed factory buildings, it maintains exhibition and performance spaces in addition to studio and coworking facilities.