• Titus Kaphar
• Artist
• NXTHVN

Titus Kaphar was born in 1976 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA. He awakened a lifelong interest in art history while attending junior college, taking a course that alerted him to his affinity for visual learning. He earned a BFA in studio art at San José State University, California, in 2001, and an MFA at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, in 2006. Kaphar’s paintings are multilayered, sometimes sculptural, through his manipulations: slashes, erasures, and swipes of paint aim to reflect the ways in which certain histories are obscured, lost, or waiting to be revealed. In a 2017 TED Talk he expounded the impact of art-making on amending the art-historical canon by demonstrating his practice in real time, applying broad paint strokes of white onto one of his canvases to create a new work, which now lives in the Brooklyn Museum’s collection. Kaphar founded the film production company Revolution Ready as an extension of his art practice in 2021 and his feature film Exhibiting Forgiveness premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Other works are held by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Detroit Institute of Arts; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Kaphar, also a recipient of a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship, lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut, where he co-founded the arts incubator NXTHVN.