Rewritten History
Titus Kaphar
“History is a continuum, it’s not these separate moments. That’s how we look at it. In the 1700’s in Virginia before there were police officers — there were these groups of men who would wander the countryside — and if they saw a black man or a black woman they would presume that black man or black woman was a slave. If you didn’t have the kind of pass that you were supposed to have, then you could be whipped, you could be enslaved, you could be taken into custody — even if you were free. And as I’m reading this I find myself thinking, ‘How is this any different to stop and frisk?’” — Titus Kaphar
The dominant narratives in Western art and culture reveal a painful history of racism; by and large the representation of black people is enslaved, in servitude or impoverished. We can’t erase that history, but painter, sculptor, filmmaker, and installation artist Titus Kaphar (b. 1976) has begun to challenge canonical portrayals of minorities and in doing so, he gives a voice to those historically oppressed. As a means of fostering a dialogue between the past and the present, the invisible and the visible, Kaphar reflects on racial dynamics and oppressive stereotypes from Jim Crow to the Black Power Movement to the worldwide protests brought on by police actions that led to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Kaphar’s work seeks to dislodge history from its status as the “past” in order to examine the complicated relationship between contemporary art and society. “I’ve always been fascinated by history: art history, American history, world history, individual history — how history is written, recorded, distorted, exploited, reimagined and understood,” Kaphar explains. “In my work I explore the materiality of reconstructive history.” His practice seeks to present the long lineage of race relations in the US, exploring the role that contemporary art can play in the community. Kaphar came into the limelight soon after Time magazine commissioned him in 2014 to contribute a cover image depicting the Ferguson Protesters, who were under consideration for its “Person of the Year” issue. On August 9, 2014, protests and riots erupted in Ferguson, Missouri after the fatal shooting of an unarmed African American teenager, Michael Brown, by a white police officer, Darren Wilson. The Ferguson protests played an integral part in the Black Lives Matter movement and the notion of a new civil rights era in the United States.
To make the painting, Yet Another Fight For Remembrance (2014), Kaphar invoked a creative conceit that has served him well in the past; he used bold, slashing strokes of white paint to obscure the gesturing bodies of a group of anonymous black protesters holding their hands above their heads, phones in the air, alluding to the iconic phrase “hands up, don’t shoot”, and then repainted their outlines in black to reinforce their formal presence in a way that acknowledges their altered lives and memorializes various facets of their trials. The technique — which Kaphar calls “whitewashing” — symbolically reads as the erasure of the black male, the silencing of a community and the public at-large, and the spectre of the criminal justice system. In addition to the visual metaphor, Kaphar adds a poetic element to the technique by mixing linseed oil into the white paint, “which, over time, makes it more transparent, allowing the character to become fully whole again.” In an interview with Huffington Post, Kaphar explained, “The whitewashing functions is a kind of erasure. I wanted to make something that didn’t feel like an illustration of an idea but an expression of a feeling.” When asked about his image, he explained that he wished to capture how the nature of the media cycle erases the impact of a situation, as if it were another brief moment quickly flashing across the screen. Kaphar completed a large-scale whitewash painting, Shifting the Gaze, a loose copy of Frans Hals’ (1582-1666) Family Group in a Landscape (1645–48), onstage during a 2017 TED Talk. In a dramatic finale, he picked up a large paint brush and proceeded to blank out the all of the white sitters with broad strokes of white paint, leaving a black boy as the centre of the composition. Much of the Western canon represents black subjects in servile positions, if at all. By shifting attention entirely to the boy, Kaphar brings into focus the need to write new, more honest and inclusive histories.
Titus Kaphar, Absconded from the Household of the President of the United States (2016)
Titus Kaphar, Impressions of Liberty (2017)
Since then, the 44-year-old artist — in addition to receiving numerous accolades for his work, including a MacArthur “Genius” grant in 2018 — has been making paintings and sculptures that confront history head on. Kaphar uses art as a medium to explain inconsistencies in the histories being told and learned about. The artist engages with a wide range of historical subjects and artistic traditions, both faux-canonical and actual, as a means of critiquing the history of art and visual culture which has traditionally been based on bias and the omission of minority subjects, particularly of African Americans. In the majority of his work Kaphar reconstructs and critiques the historical canon by looking back to eighteenth and nineteenth century American and European art and creates works that reveal unspoken truths about the nature of history and colonialist legacies. Kaphar challenges our preconditioned understanding of classical structures and styles of visual representation in Western art in order to subvert them — his intent is not just to remember those left out of the canon, but also to criticize a systemic process of deliberate obfuscation on the part of museums, historians, and institutions; his works are meant to elicit discomfort, with, in particular, the white viewer.
Kaphar dismantles the process of perception, thereby forcing the viewer to confront a history of slavery and racism that the binary historical discourse heretofore sought to normalize. Through reinterpreting portraits of heroes, legends and luminaries past, Kaphar re-contextualizes the subject, thereby exposing the conceptual underpinnings of contested nationalist histories and colonialist legacies and how they have served to manipulate both cultural and personal identity. Defined by physical manipulation, Kaphar’s work literally reconstructs accepted historical narratives. He cuts, crumples, shrouds, shreds, stitches, tars, twists, binds, erases, breaks, tears, and turns the paintings and sculptures he creates, reconfiguring them into works that expose an examine how repressed histories have shaped our understanding of Western history, whilst also unearthing hidden narratives of minority subjects that have been hitherto forgotten or untold. Recognizing that art inevitably introduces the fictitious even when employing nonfictional reference, Kaphar’s body of work seeks to impugn entrenched narratives by drawing attention to moral crises that are at once modern and age-old, inviting viewers to re-envision American history. In so doing, Kaphar reconstructs new codes and modalities, reckoning on Black possibilities. “If we don’t amend history by making new images and new representations, we are always going to be excluding ourselves.”
Titus Kaphar, The distance between what we have and what we want (2019)
Kaphar’s art addresses salient social and political concerns, but it also springs from his own life story. For example, his Jerome Project, an ongoing multimedia exploration considering “the overrepresentation of African American males in the prison system”, which he began in 2011 while searching for his estranged father’s prison records. It began with Kaphar’s online discovery of the mug shots of nearly a hundred African American men who shared the first and family names of his estranged biological father, Jerome, who had also served time in prison, which led him to consider the inordinate number of incarcerated black males. Working with wood panels of equal size, Kaphar began casting them in gold leaf and painting portraits of each man in the style of Byzantine devotional icons, which he then dipped in tar. The artist has described this series of works as “devotional style paintings of people we’re not devoted to.” 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. By this artistic act, Kaphar not only acknowledges the erasure of these men’s lives “the silencing of the incarcerated men”, but at the same time “provides a kind of privacy not afforded to them on the mugshot websites” that present the men as a condemned group connected to the public and to each other only by their status as convicts.
In works such as Drawing the Blinds (2014) and the series Seeing Through Time (2017–), Kaphar instrumentalizes the visual strategies and methods of key European classicists such as Diego Velázquez (1599-1660), Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), and Théodore Géricault (1791-1824) to rewrite the narratives of cultural empowerment with black subjects. Bridget Cooks, author of Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum, claims that the image of African Americans in American art, “has served a didactic and supportive role in national history and art history” while simultaneously being marginalized from the discourse. Behind the Myth of Benevolence (2014), one of Kaphar’s most prominent works, was inspired by a conversation the artist had with a white friend, in which he challenged his friend’s assertion that the third US President Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) was “a benevolent slave owner”. In what seems like an investigation on the infallibility of the American founding fathers, it depicts a black woman behind a rumpled canvas containing a portrait of Jefferson. She is erotically painted in an Orientalist manner: semi-nude in a turban that addresses exotic fetishes found in the mythology of black sexuality.
In re-purposing the image of an unspecified black woman, the “revealing-the-unseen” positioning behind a white man — a powerful political figure who wrote the Declaration of Independence — sets the stage for a world of metaphors for the viewer to unravel. “This painting is about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, and yet it is not,” Kaphar said. “The reason I say, ‘And yet it is not,’ is because we know from the actual history that Sally Hemings was very fair. Very, very fair. The woman who sits here is not just simply a representation of Sally Hemings, she’s more of a symbol of many of the black women whose stories have been shrouded by the narratives of our deified founding fathers.” By knocking the founding fathers from their metaphorical pedestal, it becomes possible to see a past once shrouded by their ideological reputations; whilst Jefferson bore the face of liberty, he remained a slave owner until his death. In pointing out fundamental problems in artistic representation, Kaphar trusts his audience to create the narrative. The artists particular talent lies in making these creative jumps accessible.
Absconded from the Household of the President of the United States (2016) depicts the first US President George Washington (1732-1799) obscured by a shredded document: a newspaper advertisement, from 1796, promising a reward of $10 for “for the capture of Oney Judge”, Washington’s fugitive slave. Similarly in Shadows of Liberty (2016), Kaphar depicts Washington in the Colonial art tradition of a political leader on his proverbial white horse — but shrouds him in strips of canvas, each bearing the name of an enslaved person on Washington’s plantation; from a list of over three hundred that the artist discovered on a Mount Vernon farm ledger. These works seek to challenge the viewer’s initial perception of history and can be seen as an exposé against the idealized infallibility of the American founding fathers, by visually linking both Washington and Jefferson to their slave-owning practices; an attack on the odious notion of “benevolent slavery” — a myth which has become more common in revisionist white supremacist history — which deceptively claims that some slave masters were “caring” for black slaves by providing food, clothing and shelter out of kindness.
Titus Kaphar, Yet Another Fight for Rememberance (2014)
Kaphar’s public sculpture Impressions of Liberty (2017), was commissioned by the Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey, in conjunction with the Princeton & Slavery Project. Kaphar’s work responds to archival records unearthed by the project, documenting an auction of six African American slaves — “two negro women, a negro man, and three negro children” — as part of the estate of Samuel Finley, fifth president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). The monumental two-ton sculpture features portraits of a black man, woman, and child etched in glass, framing an inverted bust of Finley carved into a block of sycamore wood (echoing the campus’s “liberty trees” nearby, which were, according to Princeton legend, planted to commemorate the repeal of the Stamp Act), as “a monument to the memory of the enslaved”. The sculpture raises questions about who is remembered and who is invisible in our accounts of history, both written and visual. The work seems particularly relevant at a time when universities across the world, including Oxford, Yale and Harvard, are reckoning with their connections to slavery, and amid a heated international conversation about monuments to slave owners following the killing of George Floyd.
In his latest series of paintings, From a Tropical Space (2019), a series of monumental, almost post-apocalyptic images, Kaphar creates a surreal, emotionally intense landscape; the artificial coloration of the suburban environments, with their fuchsia smog and wizened palm trees, too saturated to be conventionally beautiful. Kaphar describes this body of work as a “surrealist, fictional Afro-futuristic narrative”, about black mothers and the disappearance of their children. Black women have not been represented as Madonnas, Venuses, or odalisques, Kaphar observes. “What we have is the depiction of black folks in general, and black women specifically, as enslaved and [in] servitude.” The series depicts portraits of black mothers with their children erased from the canvas, leaving a ghostly absence in the women’s arms, saddled to their hips, or inside the strollers they push. Almost all of these women exist in the moment before their children vanish. “What is going on in the natural world? Why are all of these mothers so close to this botanical pattern? Think about Katrina or Flint or any other disaster in a poor Black community,” Kaphar told Gagosian Quarterly. “The challenge, however, is to only speak of what I know because there’s so much mystery to me in this work. I want these mothers to speak for themselves.” Coincident with renewed socio-political energies and content within the broader practice of figurative painting, Kaphar’s images resonate with the turbulent and uncertain times in which we live. Throughout history economic and political conditions and contexts have prompted artists to generate radical aesthetic concepts and modes; the Second World War for example was the haunting source of inspiration to many artists globally, from Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Alberto Burri (1915-1955) to Ibrahim El-Salahi (b. 1930) and Norman Lewis (1908-2003). In exactly the same way, Kaphar’s subject matter is responsive to the self-evident anxieties and fears of present-day America.
When asked by TIME in 2014 to speak about how he brings his art to fruition given the social situations with which he engages, Kaphar spoke of the gravity of the task: “Honestly, it feels beyond me. What I make ends up feeling more like catharsis than communication.” The variety of media and the boldness of presentation in Kaphar’s oeuvre demonstrate consistent engagement with this challenge, bringing histories of brutality — and the need for reconstruction and deepening of those histories — to dynamic light. Kaphar takes stereotypical portrayals and pictorial representations of racial inferiority and transforms them, sometimes radically so, by painting over them, covering them with ripped papers and wrapping over them in canvas. By engaging with the historically oppressive pictorial art of the past, Kaphar highlights the contradictions embedded in the narratives of our national heroes and histories and illuminates conditions that are firmly rooted in the present. Kaphar ultimately overcomes the sometimes denigrating narratives of African-American life through a powerful process of visual reclamation. He cannot rid the works of their racially oppressive histories or rewrite the history of European art; but instead, Kaphar’s works critically interact with the past in such a way as to recast accepted narratives and shift the audience’s perspective away from Eurocentric bias of the art-historical canon, towards a more democratic standpoint. In the artist’s own words, he makes paintings and sculptures “that wrestle with the struggles of our past but speak to the diversity and the advances of our present.” As artist, curator and writer Cara Ober said in her article published in Hyperallergic, “the best of his works hit like a sucker punch and make you feel history like a phantom limb: an aching, tingling sense of what we’ve lost.”