Titus Kaphar makes paintings, sculptures, and installations that examine the history of representation. He transforms styles and mediums with formal innovations to emphasize the physicality and dimensionality of the canvas, panel, and materials themselves. Kaphar lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut, where he established the arts residency program NXTHVN in 2017. He received an MFA from Yale University and was the distinguished recipient of a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship, as well as numerous other prizes and awards.
I began to paint those mug shots as these [small devotional-size] religious style
paintings with gilded backgrounds. I then submerged those paintings into tanks of
tar based on the amount of time that these folks had spent incarcerated.
Titus Kaphar. My Loss, 2020. Oil, tar, and gold leaf on panel. 187.3 x 151.1 x 7.3 cm (73 3/4 x 59 1/2 x 2 7/8 in.). Ralph Gindi Collection.
Tar swallows up this portrait, poignantly symbolizing the years of this man’s life he spent stuck in prison. This work emerged from Titus Kaphar’s The Jerome Project, painted mostly between 2014-2015, a series of ninety-seven portraits made from the mug shots of incarcerated Black men who share the same first and last names as the artist’s father. Monumental in scale, Jerome stares directly from the painting. The bust-length format, direct mode of address, and vast expanse of gold recall devotional images of Christ from Simone Martini’s era. Kaphar’s portrait commemorates this man who society has shunned with the visual rhetoric of Christian devotion, elevating him to the status of deity.
Object Description
At the center of this large oil painting on panel is the upper half of the face of a Black man set on a gold shield-shaped area. This painting is over 6 feet by 5 feet. This man has medium brown eyes, dark brown eyebrows, and close-cropped dark hair. He stares intently at the viewer. A bright light shines directly on him and is reflected in his high forehead. In sharp contrast a large patch of gold-speckled, textured black tar obscures his face below his eyes.
Titus Kaphar. State Number 2 (Dwayne Betts), 2019. Oil, tar, and gold leaf on panel. 192.4 x 151.1 x 7.3 cm (75 3/4 x 59 1/2 x 2 7/8 in.). Bill and Christy Gautreaux Collection.
Titus Kaphar adopts a monumental, gilded frame for his portrait of Dwayne Betts, a previously incarcerated Black man, poet, and political activist. The novel rectangular format with concave corners compresses the available space surrounding the bust, suggesting an unseen force evocative of the pressures of mass incarceration. As a visual language, it borrows authority from the frames of Christian devotional images of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, including the kind that Simone Martini pioneered in his altarpieces. The elaborate gold frame commands the viewer’s attention and stages Betts as a figure worthy of our sustained contemplation.
Object Description
This huge oil painting on wood panel shows, partially, the head of a Black man nearly filling the composition. This shield shaped portrait is over 6ft tall and 5 ft wide. The lower quarter of the painting is covered with thick black tar obscuring the man’s face below his nose. The head of the man faces the viewer directly and his light brown eyes meet the viewers in a direct level gaze. His reddish brown, burnt sienna skin is illuminated by strong light coming from slightly right of center. It creates whitish highlights on his forehead, under his left eye, and directly down the bridge of his broad nose. His close cropped brown hair and beard reveal a high forehead, slightly pointed ears, and neatly shaped, somewhat glowering eyebrows. The background of the painting is burnished gold.
Metal of Honor: Gold from Simone Martini to Contemporary Art is supported by the Abrams Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Wagner Foundation, the Robert Lehman Foundation, Fredericka and Howard Stevenson, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.
Additional support is provided by an endowment grant from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Media Partner: The Boston Globe
The Museum receives operating support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, which is supported by the state of Massachusetts and the National Endowment for the Arts.