Titus Kaphar Discusses the Paintings in His Directorial Debut

Editor’s Note: This story is part of Newsmakers, a new ARTnews series where we interview the movers and shakers who are making change in the art world.

Titus Kaphar is among today’s most closely watched artists, known for creating incisive work that tackles the history of painting and the underlying colonialist narratives present in the form, the lasting effects on incarceration on those who have been through the system, and more. In addition to being an artist, he is also a cofounder, with Jason Price, of NXTHVN, a nonprofit in New Haven, Connecticut, focused on artist mentorship through a fellowship program and exhibition program.  

In 2020, Gagosian began representing the artist and, the following year, he inked a deal with United Talent Agency for his film, TV, publishing, and podcast ventures. He also launched his own production company, Revolution Ready, which was formed to realize his directorial debut, Exhibiting Forgiveness. The semi-autobiographical film stars André Holland as Tarrell, an artist at work on his latest body of work, which focuses on his journey toward forgiveness with his estranged father. The film also features John Earl Jelks as Tarrell’s father La’Ron, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Tarrell’s mother Joyce, and Grammy Award–winning singer and songwriter Andra Day (as Tarrell’s wife Aisha), who wrote a new song for the film.

The film debuted at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and will be in theaters beginning October 18. Gagosian hosted a screening at its location in Beverly Hills, California. For the exhibition, Kaphar built a 90-seat theater inside of the gallery, where people watched the film. At the end of the last scene, the screen rolled up, with the paintings from the film on view in the gallery. The custom-built theater will remain in the gallery until the end of the exhibition’s run on November 2, with periodic showtimes.

“We are inviting people to see the film in the theater, and then come to the exhibition,” Kaphar told ARTnews. “I hope people’s experience of the film is that it is a unique kind of art movie that you don’t often see in theaters, that Hollywood doesn’t necessarily support. This is an opportunity to tell Hollywood that that we are interested in experiencing this kind of storytelling by showing up.”

To learn more about the paintings featured at Gagosian and their relationship to his practice, ARTnews spoke to Kaphar by phone ahead of the exhibition’s opening.

This interview contains spoilers for Titus Kaphar’s film Exhibiting Forgiveness; it has been edited and condensed.

ARTnews: How do you see the works made for the film, which are currently on view at Gagosian, in relationship to your own practice, vis a vis Tarrell, the character in the film who paints them?

Titus Kaphar: The nuanced understanding—and I hope that this is clear—is that it is my practice. What you see being created in the film is actually just a continuation of the work that I’ve been doing. The script is not rooted in some other kind of fictional experience. The script is rooted in my own life. Anyone who knows my work will see these paintings and say, “Oh, that’s a reference to Tropical Space,” or “Oh, that’s The Jerome Project.” 

Depending on where you see the beginning, the project started with me writing just my personal experiences as a means of trying to share something with my sons about my life, and it evolved into what became a script and a screenplay. As a screenplay, there were certain details that were changed for continuity, fluidity, and making sure the film is not five hours long. Nothing has been changed arbitrarily. The things that have been changed have not altered the truth of the experience. The character of the mother in the film is actually a conflation of my grandmother and my mother. The character of the wife is different in many ways from my wife.

I say all of that to say I made every painting in that film. These paintings are not props. What you see [at Gagosian], is not, in fact, some simulacrum of Titus’s experience. These paintings are in line with everything else that I’ve done, which makes it very different from what happens in most films. In most films, they’re using these paintings simply as props. There are moments where it looks like André [Holland] is making the paintings, and that is what it is supposed to look like. That’s the reason why I spent so much time teaching him how to paint because I needed it to be believable. But just as when we see Superman fly in a movie and it’s believable, he’s not actually flying. It is a continuation of my work, and it’s also different from a traditional Hollywood movie in that it is not being altered by the powers that be for a purpose inconsistent with my vision for the film, the project, or the piece of art. By that I mean I wrote the film, I directed the film, I was a producer on the film, I found the financing for the film. I had significantly more control than a first-time director normally has, so that comes with pluses and minuses. If you love it, great. If you don’t love it, it’s probably my fault.

You said you started writing this project as a memoir to share with your sons. At what point did you become interested in making a film, especially since you’re better known as working in painting and sculpture?

I feel like my practice for my entire career has pushed me into different mediums, not through a desire to learn those mediums but through the desire to best articulate that particular idea. If, as they say, you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If the only language that you know how to speak in is the language of painting, then there will be ideas that come to you that want to be articulated in a different language but if you’re unwilling to learn that language, then you will get something less ideal. I started off as a painter, but my practice has always been taking on new mediums to better articulate the vision of a particular piece. The piece tells you to do that. I did a whole body of work called Monumental Inversions that required learning to work with glass and wood. I’ve been referencing history in my paintings for a very long time; there may be a body of work that I’d need to learn how to paint more in a “Renaissance style”—and I’ve done that. A part of my practice is to take on new challenges for the purpose of articulating the ideas for the artwork in the language that is right for that particular piece.

That’s a very long-winded way of saying, this project wanted to be a film. I didn’t want it to be a film. Making a film is exhausting. It is one of the hardest things that I have ever done. It requires a level of coordination that is impossible without an extraordinary team around you. In my film, I have a Tony-nominated actor, two Oscar-nominated actors, an actor who’s been in an Oscar-winning film. I’m a first-time director. It’s very clear to me that in some way I don’t even deserve to be working with these people yet. They are so far beyond me, but their generosity and willingness to go on this journey with me resulted in the film that you saw, and I think we made something special.

Can you tell us more about your process as an artist? 

I have a nonprofit that I started six years ago called NXTHVN [in New Haven, Connecticut]. Through that I work with a lot of young artists, and one of the things that I say to them is “work makes work.” That has been my experience. I can get lost in my head to where I’m thinking and rethinking an idea for a piece, but generally, work evolves from the process of making other work. I will be in the studio putting brush to canvas, and as that painting in front of me evolves, it begins to point me toward the next thing that’s about to happen.

That is what happened with the film as well. Before this was a feature film, it started as a documentary. The scene where the character Tarrell goes to the basement of his father’s house and begins to ask him questions is directly taken from the documentary I made for The Jerome Project. I went back to my father’s house. We had been estranged for some time. We sat and talked, and it was hard to say the least. I came back home after finishing filming that documentary, and I didn’t really know what to do. So I just started making these paintings. I Googled my father, and I found his mug shot and 90-some other men with exactly the same first and last name as my father. I started making portraits of them and submerging them in tar based on the amount of life that they had lost to incarceration.

Case in point, it started as a documentary that wasn’t even supposed to be a piece of art. I didn’t know what it was, but it led to me doing that search, which led to me making those paintings. That process of working is what leads to new ideas, experiencing life and being honest about your feelings and figuring out a way to put them on the canvas, put them on the screen, or put them in the sculpture. That is the thing that makes what I think is an elevated work. By that, I just mean not just making work as a commodity, not just making work so that it can sell, but making work because you feel like you have something important to say. In most cases, you have something important to say to yourself first.

There’s a scene where Tarrell is at the gallery exhibition for his work and he has a heated exchange with a collector of his work. Why did you feel that was important to include?

When you make work that is rooted in your personal experience and when your practice is rooted in the cathartic process of excavating your personal experience to understand the world around you and become a better version of yourself, that moment where the work transitions into the world is sometimes a challenging one. What we see in the film is the worst version of it. The best version of it is when you have someone who’s interacting with the piece, and the piece represents a synergy between your experience and their experience, something about seeing it on the wall or seeing it on the screen makes them feel seen in the world. That is when the work is actually working. The unfortunate reality is that that is not always the case. You do come to a point in your career, where a lot of times folks are collecting works, and it is purely an investment. It’s a commodity like any other commodity, and that is when it feels challenging,

Because we’ve seen Tarrell bring these works to life in the film, we know what they’re rooted in, why he’s making them, and how important it is to him. He’s coming to grips with all of the trauma that’s going on for himself. That scene feels particularly cringey because as an audience, we’re with Tarrell. 

At the end of the film, we also see Tarrell excise a figure from one painting, leaving just its silhouette. One of your well-known series in fact features figures excised from the canvas. Did you also come to that mode of working in a similar way to the character in the film?

To me, that particular painting is the thesis for the film in a way. We’ve gone on this journey with the artist. We now understand why he feels what he feels. We understand the trauma of his past that continues to haunt him. We’ve watched him go through a piece of the forgiveness process, and we watch him excise the younger version of himself from this looping moment of trauma in his mind. That’s what the painting represents, this looping moment of trauma in his mind. He removes himself from that event, but he doesn’t throw the figure away. He leaves the absence, and places the figure on this chair, which is his looking chair. If you’re paying attention, you’ll recognize that the film starts in that chair. We start with Tarrell, the artist, in that chair. The moments of inspiration often come while seated in that space, looking. He puts his child self [the figure] in that chair and allows him to become the driver of these future potential creations.

In my own practice, that is how it functions now, but it is not how the process came to exist. The process came to exist accidentally. I was working on a portrait based on a historical painting of a man and a woman. I had spent months working on this painting and I was in graduate school at the time. I painted the two individuals to the best of my ability and was satisfied with the technique, but there was something that was not working about the painting. So I had decided that I was going to start over. I was very upset because I had a critique that was coming up within the next few days, and I knew I wasn’t going to be done in time. I was sitting there distraught, standing in front of my palette, which is a long glass table, with all of the paint of the day had been laid out on that table. I felt like I had failed what I set out to accomplish. I took my razor blade, which I used to clean the pallet, and I just started scraping the glass into piles, as I do every day. It’s part of my routine, how I end the day. And as I was scraping those piles, I stopped for a second, looked at the painting, walked over, and just cut out one of the figures from the painting. I didn’t think about it. There was no forethought. I removed the woman from the painting, and then walked back over to my palette and continued cleaning my palate. It was probably several moments before I really comprehended what I had just done. I didn’t feel angry, I didn’t feel upset, I didn’t feel much of anything. I was just on autopilot.

Once I realized what I had done and come out of that hallucination, I stared at the painting. I was like, Oh my God, what have I done? I dropped the razor blade on the palette. I left the studio, and I went home. I remember coming back to the studio next the next day. I opened the door with trepidation and looked at the painting from a distance. As I crept into the studio, I realized that there was something that felt so much more articulate about this composition than before. There was more that the absence of this figure was saying than the presence of the figure was saying, and that was a profound idea that would follow me for the rest of my practice: this idea that absence actually can speak volumes. The two figures I was referring to lived in this tumultuous relationship. In some ways, it was a rescue mission to remove the [female] figure from this circumstance that she was in, to separate her from, in many ways, her oppressor. In my critique, people talked about it as though it was an aggressive act, as though it was this violence. I tried very hard to communicate that it would be like calling removing a tumor violent. It’s far more surgical than it is aggressive. I’m using a scalpel to remove the figure from the surface of this canvas.

Can you talk a little bit more about the experience of teaching André Holland to paint for the film?

From the beginning, I said to everyone, “I don’t have a reputation as a filmmaker, so we don’t have to worry about failing that. The only reputation I have is as an artist, so what we need to do is we need to make art. If we make art, I will be happy, so let’s aim for that.”

André is an exceptional actor, who is capable of learning completely new fields. When he was playing this artist, I told André from the beginning, “I need you to be able to paint for real. I don’t want to do one of those films where we have to cut and hide the fact that you are not actually making marks.” We spent three months working together. He’d come to the studio, and we would do lessons. From day one, I was showing him techniques, and he’s a fast learner. It was not hard at all to teach him these techniques and our friendship made it comfortable. We were just two friends talking about our process, and what we began to realize is there are a lot of connections between the practice of bringing an object into the world and the practice of bringing a character to life.

I finished all of the paintings before the film was done, with only two exceptions. For the film, I made paintings at different stages, like a cooking show, so that we could be at those different stages, so it will look very believable. It looks like André knows how to paint because he knows how to paint. I’m not trying to say he’s the best painter in the world by any measure, but he knows how to paint.

At what point during the development of the film, did you know what form the paintings would take?

When I started to get into writing, one of my producers, Derek Cianfrance, coached me through that process. I started by just writing down things that I remembered of my childhood. I’d wake up at 5 in the morning and write for about two hours. Then I would take my kids to school, and then I would go into the studio. I have this app on my phone that allows me to listen to what I’ve written, so I would listen to it while I was in the studio. As I’m listening to it, images start occurring to me, so I started making paintings based on the images of the things that I’ve experienced. Write in the day, paint in the afternoon, and I’d start the whole process over the next day. I did this for between four and five months. Every Friday, I would get on the phone with Derek Cianfrance, and we would read my pages. He would say things like, “I can tell you’re not saying everything. I can tell you’re holding back here. What is this? Why are you not saying?” It felt like a kind of therapy. He pushed me to tell as much truth as it was safe to reveal. 

I’ve said this a lot, but the world that I come from is not the art world. I recognize that there is a gap between the art world and community that I come from, the community that so much inspires the work that I make. My hope is that the film itself functions as a kind of bridge between those two worlds. I have work that is up at the Metropolitan Museum right now. It’s probably one of the proudest moments of my career to finally have a piece in that collection, yet I recognize that most of my family members from Michigan will never see it there. Frankly, we didn’t grow up going to museums as kids, but we did watch movies. Hopefully there’s something about this movie that helps bring people from my community into galleries and vice versa.