Titus Kaphar is an American visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans painting, sculpture, and installation. His work critically reexamines Western art history and the construction of race within American identity. By cutting, obscuring, stitching, and distorting painted surfaces, Kaphar reveals the silences and exclusions embedded in dominant cultural narratives, confronting histories of power, visibility, and erasure.

Working through material disruption such as cutting, shredding, stitching, veiling, and layering his canvases, Kaphar transforms traditional portraiture into sites of rupture and intervention. Figures emerge and recede beneath draped fabric, tar, or altered surfaces, foregrounding both presence and absence. These gestures expose the mechanics of representation itself and question who is seen, who is obscured, and how history is constructed.

Kaphar’s art fuses historical critique with formal innovation, reframing painting as a space of excavation and repair. Through acts of erasure and revelation, he invites viewers to confront the narratives embedded in cultural memory and to reconsider how Black life is represented, remembered, and restored within the visual archive.

Highlights:

• Kaphar earned a BFA from San Jose State University and an MFA from Yale University School of Art.
  

• Major solo exhibitions include presentations at the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Seattle Art Museum; the Studio Museum in Harlem; and the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.
  

• Awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (2018) in recognition of his transformative contributions to contemporary art and historical critique.
  

• Founder of NXTHVN, a New Haven–based arts incubator and residency program supporting artists and curators of color.
  

• Represented the United States at the Venice Biennale (2017) and has exhibited internationally in museums and galleries across the United States and Europe.
  

• His work is held in significant public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Brooklyn Museum; and the National Gallery of Art.
  

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Click the link to learn more about Titus Kaphar and his work through his website. Watch the video below!

Titus Kaphar, “Forget Me Not (James Armistead Lafayette)”, 2025

“The Fire This Time” – Gagosian, Paris, France (January 29 – March 7, 2026)

This solo exhibition by Titus Kaphar presents new paintings that continue his interrogation of history, erasure, and representation. Through layered surfaces, material disruption, and reworked portraiture, Kaphar examines how narratives of race and power are constructed and obscured, inviting viewers to confront the fragility and persistence of collective memory.

Past Exhibitions

• New Alte̲rs: Reworking Devotion – Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London, United Kingdom (March 17 – May 15, 2022)
  

• “From a Tropical Space” – Gagosian, West 21st Street, New York, NY, USA (October 1 – December 19, 2020)
  

• “UnSeen: Our Past in a New Light, Ken Gonzales-Day and Titus Kaphar” – Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C., USA (March 23, 2018 – January 6, 2019)

Featured Artworks

Titus Kaphar, “ A Revolution of Rest”, 2025

Titus Kaphar, “Beneath an Unforgiving Sun”, 2020

Titus Kaphar, “Not My Burden,” 2019

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