Titus Kaphar

New E̲nunciation (2021) represents a shift in scale from the earlier, smaller collage that inspired it, reimagining the biblical tale of the Annunciation, in which an angel visits the Virgin Mary to tell her that she will give birth to Jesus. Excavating images from his personal archive, Kaphar recasts the scene’s characters to show this “glorious message” being delivered to a Black worker in front of a broken-down car, surrounded by a field full of enslaved individuals. Where the combination of references to nineteenth-century photography and Renaissance painting built into this work establishes a complex material and conceptual stratification, another canvas, Saints of De-Industry (2021), employs a very different setting. Here, Kaphar layers images of two figures and a helicopter over a view of postindustrial Detroit. A central bust half-covered in black tar and a man who steps over the border of the work’s frame both represent the workers who were vital to the city’s construction, but who suffered the most in its latter-day decline.

In sculptures such as Shroud of Washington (2021) and Sindon (2022), Kaphar combines representational painting with object making, investigating formal strategies suggested in part by the work of Sam Gilliam, Lucio Fontana, and Robert Rauschenberg—all artists who have themselves deconstructed the canvas en route to a disruption of the image and its contexts. In Shroud of Washington, Kaphar’s painted reproduction of John Trumbull’s General George Washington at Trenton (1792) has been removed from its stretchers to cloak a life-size female figure. Dressed in military uniform, Washington’s distorted image smothers the woman beneath it, underscoring the former president’s problematic legacy. Kaphar also makes explicit reference to Chamberlain by including the artist’s COLONELGARGLE, a work in painted and chrome-plated steel that employs a similar crumpling technique.

Presenting the past as a still influential component of the present, Kaphar demands that viewers become active producers of history, addressing the complex legacies of previous antagonisms to consider the notion of deliverance. Is it possible, he asks, to emancipate the pictured individuals from the tragedy of their captured moments?