In 2014, Kaphar painted Behind the Myth of Benevolence, which depicts President Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman held captive by Jefferson and the mother of six children fathered by Jefferson. The painting is titled Yet Another Fight for Remembrance and depicts two protesters with their hands raised with white paint streaked over their bodies and faces. The work was a 4 ft x 5 ft oil on canvas and used Kaphar's signature style of painting over his own work with white paint. Kaphar was commissioned in 2014 by Time magazine to paint a response to the Ferguson Uprising. These rooms are able to be walked through and experienced. The rooms contain fragments of memories, specters, and paintings. Kaphar intended to create a physical space for Vesper to return and face his memories, and this became the foundation of The Vesper Project. Vesper broke out of the hospital and visited a 19th-century house, believing it was his family's home. The two exchanged letters for some time, writing about family and mental instability. During Vesper's subsequent institutionalization, Kaphar and Vesper began a correspondence. The visitor, Benjamin Vesper, experienced a mental breakdown during his visit and punched one of Kaphar's paintings. I felt like I was losing my mind." The Vesper Project was also a collaboration with a visitor to the Yale Art Gallery, where one of Kaphar's paintings was displayed. It made me feel as if I couldn’t trust my own memory. That left me reeling it left me frightened. He spoke about the experience while promoting his show: "It occurred to me that, for some reason, my brain had decided to insert her into periods in my life when I needed extra support. The project was inspired by Kaphar's attempt to paint a portrait of his aunt, only to realize that parts of his memories of her were fictive. Kaphar created an installation where visitors would walk through a 19th-century house, uncertain about what was reality and what was remembrance. It concerns a fictional African-American family in the 19th century that passes for white. The Vesper Project is one of Kaphar's most immersive installations. The juxtaposition of the fully clothed Jefferson with Hemmings' nudity reinforces the unfair power dynamic between the two, and revises Jefferson's public image to include his sexual relationship with his much younger slave. One such example is his portrait of Thomas Jefferson, painted in the Neoclassical style, which he attached to the corner of a nude Sally Hemings' portrait frame. His work is often multidimensional and sculptural, with canvases slashed and dangling off the frame, or hanging over another painting. He received his BFA from San Jose State University in 2001 and his MFA from Yale University. His first introduction to art was in a junior college art history course, and he taught himself to paint by visiting museums. Titus Kaphar was born in 1976 in Kalamazoo, Michigan. His paintings are held in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, New Britain Museum of American Art, Seattle Art Museum, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and University of Michigan Museum of Art. Titus Kaphar is an American contemporary painter whose work reconfigures and regenerates art history to include the African-American subject.
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