Titus Kaphar

Art has the power to reframe our history. When you dislodge history from its status as the “past,” you unearth its contemporary relevance, says award-winning artist Titus Kaphar. Titus works with history—history writ large, as well as his own story, familial and personal—to offer a stirring portrait of the here and now. His body of work is broad, in both form and substance, speaking to the most vital discussions happening around race, inclusion, and reconciliation in the United States.

Titus’s debut feature film, Exhibiting Forgiveness, follows a Black artist on the path to success who receives an unexpected visit from his estranged father. It delves into trauma, resilience, and the power of art, and premiered at Sundance alongside works by titans like Steven Soderbergh. Exhibiting Forgiveness is “strikingly flawless” (RogerEbert.com) and “visually stunning” (Deadline). Variety calls it “a feel-the-reality movie, a drama willing to scald. That’s its quiet power.”

Titus collaborated with poet Reginald Dwayne Betts on The Redaction at MoMA PS1 (now a book of the same name). They unite their mediums to reveal the ways the legal system exploits and erases the poor and incarcerated from public consciousness, drawing inspiration from lawsuits filed by the Civil Rights Corps (CRC) on behalf of people incarcerated because of an inability to pay court fines and fees. Together, the voices of poet and artist blend with those of the plaintiffs and prosecutors, reclaiming these lost narratives.

As an engrossing keynote speaker, Titus exposes how all depictions, no matter how personal or grandiose, are always imperfect and capable of being remade. In recognition of his powerful vision, TIME magazine commissioned an artwork for their cover in response to the protests in Ferguson, Missouri—freezing in time an unforgettable moment of potential, protest, and civil rights upheaval. Titus explores the overwhelming volume of men trapped in our criminal justice system bearing his own father’s name in The Jerome Project. The mug shots of these “Jeromes,” all Black, are re-imagined as gilded, devotional subjects submerged in tar—signaling how much time they’ve lost in prison as well as a historical form of torture. Titus re-mixes the work of Classical and Renaissance painters in Drawing the Blinds, interrogating the history of aesthetics while revealing marginalized, forgotten figures.