Titus Kaphar, Artist
BFA, San Jose State University, 2001
MFA, Yale University, 2006
Once an aspiring rock star who played at local San Jose nightclubs, Titus Kaphar didn’t discover his artistic talent in painting until he was in college. Having struggled with academics while he was young, Kaphar, a San Jose State and Yale University alumnus, is now an internationally renowned artist.
Titus Kaphar, BFA '01
Inspired by social justice incidents, Kaphar first expressed his artistic talent during a performance art class at San Jose State. Shortly thereafter, he took these expressions to the canvas and started his first paintings. When asked about the inspiration behind these first works, Kaphar says, “I realized that if I really wanted to understand art history from the perspective of those who didn’t write it, and were absent from it, then I was going to have to do that research on my own. My work became a way of doing that research.” Kaphar’s first series out of graduate school was an exhibition of 20 paintings: Visual Quotations, a historical art survey of black people in paintings from 18th- and 19th-century works.
Kaphar says the San Jose State faculty and staff taught him how to use visual arts to express his life experiences. Rupert Garcia, a political artist of the ’60s and ’70s, was the most influential professor he’s ever had. Kaphar says, “Art is the thing that made me understand I could be academically successful.”
As a San Jose City College transfer student, he sought the help of another SJSU employee: Maria Romo, guidance counselor. He credits the late Romo with changing everything for him. Romo spent many hours counseling Kaphar. She helped him get tested and deal with his dyslexia (something that was never treated before college), and she encouraged him academically. Kaphar later made the SJSU honor roll.
After Kaphar received his bachelor of fine arts degree, another SJSU professor, Robert Chiarito, encouraged him to apply for the summer program at Yale University. Even though Kaphar was rejected when he first applied, it was sheer determination—obsession—as he calls it, that made him apply until he was accepted. Kaphar received his master of fine arts degree from Yale in 2006.
Kaphar creates copies of 18th- and 19th-century Western paintings, which he then cuts, crumples, shreds or sometimes splashes with tar, to show the untold histories of this time period. Kaphar describes this work as a “narrative that is absent from the art and is incomplete.” He views his sculptural paintings as a re-construction rather than a deconstruction. Kaphar reconstructs art in a way that, in his mind, makes it complete.
Today a husband and father, Kaphar wants his work to be about what he is really feeling about life in general. “The more he experiments with these particular gestures, the more the processes themselves come to life,” he says. Kaphar does not choose what his work is to become, but rather responds to it and allows it to become something unexpected.
Kaphar is currently represented by the Friedman Benda Gallery in New York, and his present exhibition, Re-Interpreting the European Collection, is showing at the Bermuda National Gallery in Hamilton, Bermuda, until May 2012.
-Valerie P. Gonzales
To learn more about Kaphar’s art, visit his website.
