Multimedia Artist Titus Kaphar was this year’s Ranch Week Honoree at Anderson Ranch in Snowmass Village.
Kaphar has risen to be one of the foremost painters and filmmakers in the U.S., despite a difficult childhood.
His work focuses on race, history and representation, and he works to include African American figures in his work, especially when they’ve been forgotten in traditional art history lessons or texts.
He told his story from the Shermer Meeting Hall stage last month, drawing on his personal mission to maintain authenticity when making art.
Born in 1976 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to 15-year-old parents, Kaphar had a tough time in school. He was kicked out of kindergarten and graduated from high school with a 0.65 GPA.
However, after he took an art history course at San Jose State University, Kaphar was hooked on both art and school.He said in his first art history course, Black artists were not frequently mentioned.
In a 300-page textbook, he said the section on Black art was only 14 pages long.
“It was a terrible section, but it existed,” he said. “It wasn't like ‘Black painters.’ It wasn't even ‘Black artists.’ It was Black everything. If there was a Black person in the painting, if there was a Black person who painted the painting, if the author's friend was Black … it was like thrown into this section. It didn’t make any sense.”
Kaphar was excited, nonetheless, to discuss the content in class. However, when they reached this section in the textbook, Kaphar’s professor said they did not have time to go over it and had to move on.
Devastated, he ripped the “Black Art” section out of his textbook.
“What you had in the end was this little pamphlet, and as I was ripping out these pages, I just found myself getting more and more frustrated, more and more angry,” Kaphar said.
Kaphar used this experience as inspiration for a new assignment for a class final project, conducting independent research on Black artists from the textbook.
“I realized that if I wanted to know this history, I was going to have to actually create my own syllabus — my own bibliography,” Kaphar said. “I was going to have to find this history myself. … So my artistic practice arose from that class.”
Kaphar ended up painting every Black figure mentioned in that section of his textbook. This body of work got him accepted into Yale University and helped launch his artistic career.
While Kaphar says his art is not meant to be political, other people often interpret it that way.
Filmmaker Debi Wisch, who interviewed Kaphar at Anderson Ranch in July, described his work as observational, more than political.
“It’s American history,” she said. “It’s not Black history. It’s not white history. It's our shared history, but other people's perceptions of things can make it political.”
Wisch also said that Kaphar’s work has a lot of empathy for people who have been left out of the historical narrative, including women and people of color, as well as those who don't know about the erasure of these individuals from historical records.
“the spirit of Titus' practice … has much to do with adding to a narrative, making it more robust, honest, truthful, inclusive," Wisch said.
In 2014, Kaphar was featured in an exhibition at Monticello — Thomas Jefferson’s ancestral home.
He was the first contemporary artist to show artwork at the residence, and one of his pieces depicts Sally Hemings, a woman enslaved by Jefferson, behind a curtain with the former President’s face on it.
Kaphar was inspired to create “Behind the Myth of Benevolence,” by a conversation that he had with a retired American history teacher in which they referred to Thomas Jefferson as a benevolent slave owner.
“That doesn't make sense to me,” Kaphar said. “I know what benevolent means. I know what slave owner means, but I don't know what it means when you put those two things together.’”
The work intends to showcase the irony of Jefferson’s written word and his actions: preaching about freedom and independence while owning hundreds of slaves.
“I’m not interested in demonizing the founding fathers,” Kaphar said. “That’s not interesting to me at all, but I’m also not interested in deifying them — turning them into gods.”
These types of conversations are what Peter Waanders, president of Anderson Ranch, wants to bring to the arts center as the country sees increasing political and racial divides.
“In this divided world — the disparity and isolation — Anderson Ranch is a safe place and a safe place for everyone. This art gives us an opportunity to bring us together.”
Kaphar has had art dealers tell him he would sell more of his work if it wasn’t perceived as political, but that’s not what Kaphar thinks about when he’s creating.
With two sons in high school, Kaphar said he wants to lead by example and create art that helps him understand his family’s history and how it fits into the American narrative.
“People's personal stories are what connect us. We're all human. We all have these different tragedies, traumas."
Kaphar hopes his artwork will prompt others to have honest conversations about the reality of Black experiences.
