Dec 16, 2025
Titus Kaphar in Conversation at the AGO
Artist Titus Kaphar and Professor Jason Stanley will discuss Kaphar's practice on December 20
Titus Kaphar. Photo: Mario Sorrennti
During his 2017 TED Talk, “Can Art Amend History,” Titus Kaphar accented his presentation by applying large swaths of white paint to a re-creation of Frans Hals’ Family Group in a Landscape (1645). With his brushstrokes, Kaphar obscured the painting’s four central figures – a white European family – bringing a lone Black figure to the fore; a young servant originally cast as least significant in the frame. With this act of live painting, Kaphar completed a work in his Whitewash series (Shifting the Gaze, 2017), continuing an upward trajectory in his career that has resulted in global exhibitions, widespread acclaim and even an autobiographical feature film that he wrote and directed. On Saturday, December 20, Kaphar will appear at the AGO for the first time for an in-depth conversation about his artistic practice with philosophy professor Jason Stanley.
Kaphar is a painter, sculptor, filmmaker, and installation artist whose work confronts history by dismantling classical structures and styles of visual representation in Western art. Through the deconstructive techniques of cutting, shredding, stitching, binding, and erasing, Kaphar reconstructs new codes and modalities, allowing Black possibilities to emerge. In Yet Another Fight for Remembrance (2014), he used thick white brushstrokes to obscure the gesturing bodies of a group of African American men in the “Hands up, don’t shoot” position, and then repainted their outlines in black to reassert their formal presence. His ongoing Jerome series began with Kaphar’s online discovery of the mug shots of ninety-seven African American men who shared his father’s first and last names. He paints gilded portraits of each man in the style of Byzantine devotional icons and then dips them in tar to a depth corresponding to their time incarcerated.
Titus Kaphar. Page 4 of Jefferson's "Farm Book," January 1774, Goliath, Hercules, Jupiter, Gill, Fanny, Ned, Sucky, Frankey, Gill, Nell, Bella, Charles, Jenny, Betty, June, Toby, Duna (sic), Cate, Hannah, Rachael, George, Ursula, George, Bagwell, Archy, Frank, Bett, Scilla, ?, 2018. Oil and tar on linen, 60 x 48 inches (152.4 x 101.6 cm). Private Collection
In 2016, Kaphar completed The Jerome Project, a short documentary produced as a continuation of his series of paintings mentioned above. This short film became the basis for a feature length film, Exhibiting Forgiveness, written, directed and produced by Kaphar. Starring Andre Holland and Aunjanue Ellis, the autobiographical film debuted at Sundance Film Festival in 2024 and has since garnered wide critical acclaim. It features several of Kaphar’s original paintings.
Jason Stanley is a philosopher. He holds the Bissell-Heyd Chair in American Studies in the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and also has an appointment in the Department of Philosophy. The author of seven books and dozens of scholarly articles in multiple disciplines, Stanley also writes for a broader audience on the themes of authoritarianism, propaganda, free speech, mass incarceration, and democracy, most frequently for The New York Times, The Guardian, and Project Syndicate.
Titus Kaphar. Yet Another Fight for Remembrance, 2014. Oil on canvas, 60 x 48 inches (152.4 x 101.6 cm). Commissioned by TIME Magazine in 2014. Private Collection
Titus Kaphar and Jason Stanley will be live in conversation on Saturday, December 20 at 2pm in the Marvin Gelber Print & Drawing Study Centre on level 1 of the AGO. Book your tickets here.
![Keith Haring in a Top Hat [Self-Portrait], (1989)](/sites/default/files/styles/image_small/public/2023-11/KHA-1626_representation_19435_original-Web%20and%20Standard%20PowerPoint.jpg?itok=MJgd2FZP)
