From New Haven, USA, Titus Kaphar is famously known for appropriating images and paintings from American and European art history. By subverting well-known artworks from collections around the world, Kaphar challenges racism in the past and present, confronting viewers with the injustices and truths they would rather forget.
Black History Month is a time for reflecting on African and Caribbean histories, and for celebrating the achievements those of African-Caribbean descent have contributed to our society. We have come a long way in the global conversation on diversity and race, but by showcasing the forgotten individuals that were erased from history, Kaphar’s work is a necessary reminder of the past and how it bleeds into the present.
Kaphar’s journey as an artist started when he registered onto an art history class at junior college in California. He was surprised and outraged when the professor announced they would be skipping over the “black people in art” section of the syllabus. When questioned, the professor simply said that there was “no time” to cover it. In art history, there is more written about dogs than black people, and so, an educational institution’s ready refusal to teach matters on race is problematic and yet another example of the erasure of black individuals.
Can Art Amend History? was a TedTalk hosted by Kaphar in 2017 where he whitewashed over the main figures in Frans Hals’ portrait of a 16thcentury aristocratic family to draw attention to the black servant in the background. Many of his works are centred around the concept of shifting viewer perspective to show the forgotten figures, but crucially, he does not want to erase the history. In fact, he wants us to recognise that we can’t erase it because “it’s real [and] we have to know it.”
By reconfiguring traditional artworks, Kaphar describes his work as nodding to hidden narratives, confronting the troubling and difficult past of slavery and racism in the United States. This is evidently seen in his outstanding portfolio of works – some which have been exhibited at world-renowned institutions such as New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.
In 2014, there was a fatal shooting of an unarmed African American teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri. At the end of the year, Time magazine commissioned Kaphar to create a work to commemorate this event. He titled his work Yet Another Fight for Remembrance (2014). This event was an integral part of the Black Lives Matter movement and Kaphar’s work reflected the struggles and horrors which African people still face in the 21sttcentury and shows his frustration at the world still trying to silence black voices.
Other works include Behind the Myth of Benevolence (2014), where he created a draping effect, where a portrait of Thomas Jefferson is peeling off to reveal behind it another portrait of a black female servant; Shadows of Liberty (2016) where he nailed canvas strips to a figure of George Washington riding a horse, each with the name of slaves Washington owned.
Through each work, Kaphar gives the forgotten black individual a sense of personhoodand powerfully reactivates history by addressing slavery head-on. His paintings wrestle with the world’s difficult past while speaking to the diversity and progress of our present.
To find out more about Kaphar and his work, check out his website: https://kapharstudio.com