Titus Kaphar:

Undoing Myths

At the core of most national myths is a cult of the founders, a veneration of figures taken to be the original figures who defined the nation. It may be, as in the United States, something like the “founding fathers,” or it may be people whose conquests or achievements were so great that they are taken to be essential to the nation’s identity (Joan of Arc?). Such cults can be relatively innocent, but when they are taken as a justification for placing one group of citizens (those who share the founders’ “identity”) above others, they mount an existential threat to democracy. When the founders are represented as embodying a superior racial or religious identity, a cult of the founders may justify atrocity. For over a decade, the work of Titus Kaphar has cut through the American version of this myth, uncovering the history of the people it necessarily erases.

In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) Toni Morrison wrote, “There is quite a lot of juice to be extracted from plummy reminiscences of ‘individualism’ and ‘freedom’ if the tree upon which such fruit hangs is a black population forced to serve as freedom’s polar opposite.” Indeed, large parts of the mythology of American freedom are predicated on the nonfreedom of Black and Indigenous Americans. Think, for example, of the settlers’ covered wagons heading west in the nineteenth century, a picture many of us have in our heads as an iconic symbol of American freedom: That image is simultaneously an image of Indigenous dispossession and loss. In his painting The Cost of Removal (2017), Kaphar reworks a contemporary portrait of Andrew Jackson, the American president responsible for the Indian Removal Act of 1830—an important step in that dispossession. Jackson is shown mounted on horseback, a pose stereotypical of American freedom. Strips of cloth are nailed to the canvas, hanging down from Jackson’s chin to his feet; on these strips Kaphar has written the words Jackson used to justify the removal of Indigenous Americans from their land. The nails recall the nail-studded power objects of Africa’s Kongo religion, an example of which Kaphar had seen at the Yale University Art Gallery. Their presence, then, is a manifestation of Black agency in both material and technique; they are also, well, rusty nails driven into a president’s face.

To represent George Washington as innocent is to demand that history forget those he enslaved. Kaphar’s Shadows of Liberty (2016) is an oil portrait of Washington, on a grand scale characteristic of the subject. Like Jackson in The Cost of Removal, Washington is on horseback and strips of cloth are nailed to his head; here, each strip bears the name of a person he enslaved, the names being drawn from the ledger where he kept track of such things. The title Shadows of Liberty alludes to the same point Morrison makes; that American freedom must be understood in the light of such shadows.

In his new paintings Kaphar continues his focus on America’s cult of the founders. Bathing in the Warmth of Another Stolen Day (Ona Judge) (2025), for example, refers to a woman enslaved by Washington and his wife, Martha; classified as a fugitive slave after her escape from the household in 1796, she was pursued by agents of the Washington family and located in New Hampshire, but refused to return. Here Kaphar calls our attention to the whitewashing of her legacy and even existence under the conception of “patriotic education” espoused by Donald Trump, and codified in one of the forty executive orders he issued in the first ten days of his second presidency, “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K–12 Schooling,” which calls for schools to instill in their students “a patriotic admiration for our incredible Nation and the values for which we stand.”

American history has always demanded such erasures of the agency of anyone who is not white, Christian, and male (like the founding fathers). They were documented, for example, by W. E. B. Du Bois, whose 1935 book Black Reconstruction challenged the narrative myths that erased Black agency and accomplishment in the Civil War and its aftermath and set up a fictional past that absolved whites of any guilt in ending Reconstruction. Kaphar’s work attacks similar racist myths, and constitutes a powerful visual critique of white innocence, but Kaphar often performs this critique indirectly, his more primary goal being to defend the legacy of Black Americans whose agency and indeed existence is threatened by racist history. Forget Me Not (James Armistead Lafayette)(2025), for example, commemorates an African-American who spied for the Continental Army, having been promised his freedom for passing military intelligence to the Americans while seeming to work for the British. As if to emphasize the absurdity of Trump’s frequent call for a “patriotic history,” Kaphar’s painting reminds us that attacks on Black history and agency are a distortion of patriotism rather than an amplification of it.

Kaphar’s new series operates differently from his earlier work: As well as offering alternative perspectives on our founding myths, it must be read as a defiant resistance to a moment when Black history is subject to specific legal and administrative threat. It speaks both to a lengthy history of erasure and to a current moment when any challenge to these erasures faces increasing legal danger. The current American regime makes its targets deliberately vague (“Anti-Americanism”) but emphasizes exactly the kind of work Kaphar has been making.

This year marks the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, which the Trump regime is planning to celebrate with “patriotic” art and architecture. Kaphar will challenge this propaganda by exhibiting his work in several American museums. Those now in power regard the perspectives his work provides as problematic for their rule. They rightly regard his project as a threat to fascism.