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Watching Titus Kaphar's Ted Talk helped me understand the motive behind his paintings. He believes we should not focus on forgetting or eradicating the past, but rather remember it to progress towards a better future. Essentially, he modifies paintings to highlight different perspectives that might have not been considered and transform the gaze, the way people look at a subject.
Kaphar's design choice for his website is interesting. His minimalistic design really keeps his viewer's attention on his artwork. He also organizes his various forms of art, such as cutouts, collages, drawings, etc., into their own category. This way his audience can explore the plethora of innovations that he has made with ease.
Time Travel, 2013, www.kapharstudio.com
After trying to decipher this image for a while , I soon gave up and decided to search online for some context. To my dismay, there was nothing. So, I am going to reason through it. Everything in this painting is whitewashed except for the mouth, the gun, and partially the belt buckle.
Figuring out that the belt buckle is from the military during the civil war, I came to the conclusion that this is a black soldier. This brought up the question: What is Kaphar trying to tell us by shifting the gaze towards the gun and the mouth?
My interpretation: After the Civil War, although enslaved people had achieved liberation, they were not given equal rights hence racial discrimination and segregation. The Civil War was very violent and obviously an armed battle right? Contrastingly, black people were able to get their full rights and be acknowledged as a citizen through The Civil Rights Act of 1964 by using nonviolent protest methods. Maybe, the mouth represents nonviolence and the gun represents violence. The picture as a whole might be a representation of the African American fight for equality and rights, and Kaphar highlighted the different ways that took place.
When I saw this painting, I was reminded of a book I had recently read called "The Color Purple" by Alice Walker. In this story, Celie, the protagonist, has an internal conflict about her belief in God. She has encountered many struggles such as abuse and being distanced from her sister, and to comfort herself she is shown talking to God in many of her letters. Celie starts to give up on God due to her unchanging situation despite her persistent belief and faith. Coupled with this is her trouble with the representation of God. The following is an excerpt that shows this:
This supports the idea that the race of God has been culturally ingrained. Since the bible does not specifically identify races or ethnicity, this has left it open for interpretation. Since Europeans are the prime contributors to Christian art, their own interpretation is reflected. Therefore, it turned from an interpretation into a globally accepted idea...
If I search up "God" on Google Images, this is what comes up:
God has been artistically depicted as a white man. This served as a backbone for social Darwinism, a concept that revolves around a hierarchy of races. These representations are a case of inferential racism since people look at this and are unconsciously being fed with the idea of a superior race. As mentioned by Cooks, black people were not represented in modern art so these visual representations acted as a way to oppress them. The idea that I am trying to get across is that by showing a religious figure being white, it conveys the message that white people are people of God. It alienates the other races. So, Kaphar's picture of Jesus being depicted as black serves as an alternate representation which boldly confronts the idea of Jesus just being one race. Since the painting was made in 2020, a possible context for it could be the BLM movement. Something I think is important in the painting is Kaphar's choice to cover up only the head with a black person because he could have drawn a whole new painting with Jesus being entirely black. But I think that modifying an already existing Christian art serves as a way for him to make a strong statement that he is defying pre-existing racial representation. The concept of white followers in the painting praising the Black Jesus is an example of this since it shows the opposite of what traditionally takes place. This might be a reason that Kaphar picked this specific Christian art to modify.
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