Titus Kaphar
Appearances
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
The documentary happened because I was going back to Michigan, where I'm from, Kalamazoo, to visit my grandmother. And when I got to my grandmother's house, my father was sitting on the doorstep, and I had my sons with me, and my wife was with me, and they'd never seen him before. My kids were probably about seven and five or something like that at that time.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
And I basically told him I didn't really want to talk and that this wasn't a good time. So I walked up the stairs, walked into the house, and to my surprise, my father followed me in. Now, this is my maternal grandmother. And so as I was starting to get a little frustrated about the situation, my grandmother said, baby, you need to talk to him.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
And I say this all the time, but when my grandmother tells you to do something, you do it. There's no question. I had a camera on my shoulder at the time because I was going to take a photograph of her. I was going to make a painting and drawing of her. And so kind of on a whim, I said to my father, if you want to talk, let me let me film you. There's a there's a lot to be accounted for.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
And I was hoping he would say no, but he said yes. He said be in my house for 15 minutes. And that was the beginning of it. And the truth of the matter is that documentary felt wildly unsatisfying. I showed it publicly in the theater one time and decided I don't want that in the world like that.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
A lot of it was just the fact that it felt like it did a really good job of telling me where I was but not how I got there. It was me as an adult reflecting on these things as an adult. And there was no space for that child, that child's voice in that documentary. And somehow that felt really necessary.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
So as I let go of the idea of the documentary project and I moved in to the idea of doing this as a feature film, I realized that it was going to be necessary for me to think differently about my father when I write him as a character.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
Yeah, I mean, the writing process was very different for me. And so what happened is I'd wake up in the morning.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
about five o'clock and i'd start writing for a couple hours take my kids to school and then i would go to the studio and i would i would start drawing or sketching from what i had written the day before so i have this app on my phone that allows me to listen to text so i was listening to that and remembering all of the things from my childhood experiences and And just writing that down.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
And initially, I was writing this stuff for the purpose of trying to tell my sons a little bit about their father, me, about where I come from and, you know, why I don't like to talk about when I was a kid so much. And for their whole lives, I've always said, well, I'll tell you more when you're older.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
Yeah. And so my oldest is going off to college now. So I think that's part of what initiated this whole process for me. And the painting aspect of it is so – that's so normal. That's my happy place. That's peace, you know. I'm a pretty extroverted person, but that's only because I have – all of this time alone in the studio.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
So that part felt normal, felt right, and it made the writing process easier because the writing process was far more emotional than I expected it to be. The process of sitting down and writing made me remember things that I had pushed out of my mind.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
for a long time and I Also as I took it from reality and moved it into the script it actually became more difficult when I was moving it into a script because If you were writing a character you have to be honest about that characters motivations you can't just say this is a bad guy and And as a young man, I would have told you that my father was the villain of my narrative. He was the bad guy.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
It wasn't until I sat down to write and I had to ask myself, no, no, that's not enough. Why is he doing what he's doing? What are the motivations for his actions? What are the broader context of the world? Yes, that's right. You grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Yes, that's right. That was a place of industry, of factories, of businesses. And yes, that's right.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
By the time you were in high school, all of those businesses, so many of them had been shut down. And so there were no jobs. There were few opportunities. And yes, that's right. Crack cocaine came in right at that same time. So with context and writing and asking myself the motivation for this character, I gained a compassion, a sympathy for my father that I never had as a young man.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
He has a young son. Terrell has a young son. I have two. You know, I think fundamentally this film is about one artist's journey towards healing. Of course, there's this question of this father who reenters the situation and whether or not there will be reconciliation or forgiveness between them. And we go with this family on this journey. The film for me is about generational healing, about
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
How does this generation make sure that our children don't have to carry the same wounds and baggage that we carry? Is there a way for us to leave it here so that they can go on without that burden? And in the film, the artist Terrell and his wife Aisha, they figure this out through their artistic practice itself.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
The thing that I'm most excited about is in the film you see the practice of two artists connected, caring for one another. It's not generally the picture of an artist that you see on film.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
Yeah. I mean, there's a moment in the film where Jermaine, Terrell's son, runs in the house and starts jumping on the couch. And I love that scene. Daniel, the young kid who played that part, he's extraordinary. And he comes in, he starts jumping on the couch. And I wish I would run into the house and jump on my mother's couch. I wish I would. That would be a very short scene.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
But Terrell, he walks in and he gently grabs his son by the shoulders. And he looks him in his eye and he says, breathe. I want you to breathe with me. Let's take a breath together. And what that's about is giving the next generation different tools than we had. We weren't told that it was okay that we could cry. That was something that we had to suppress.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
That was something that it was necessary for us to hold in. We grew up in a kind of rough spot. You didn't want people to see you weak. That meant you were vulnerable. And if you were vulnerable, the opportunity to take you was there. And so that became another thing I began to understand is like, even these things that feel harsh, in the minds of our parents. This was for our protection.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
And I don't agree with doing that to your children. I have to believe that love and compassion and kindness and care, those things are the things that we offer to our children, and that will bring them to a peace, a place of peace and wholeness.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
But at the same time, recognizing that the world that I grew up in, the neighborhood that I grew up in, was fundamentally different from the neighborhood that my children are growing up in. I understand why, why they made the decisions they made, why they did what they did.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
First shout out to Kate Capshaw, his wife. She's a painter. That's how we met. She came to the studio and we were just geeking out about paint. I had these canvases there that I had been working on for the film. She asked me, she said, what is all this work about? This feels a little different from your other paintings.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
And so I had a script in my hand and I handed it to her, signed it and said, you know, thanks for coming to the studio. Appreciate you. And Kate and I have stayed in touch. And so she read the script in about 24, 48 hours and got back to me and said, this is something special. Do you mind if I share it with Steven? And I said, yeah, no, of course not. That's insane. What are you, nuts?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
I said, of course. And she gave it to Stephen. And within a couple of days, he got back to me and he said, do you have something very special here? This is not the kind of film that Hollywood usually treats well. You have to protect yourself. It's going to be difficult, and it is not going to fix everything. And he had just done his own family story.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
Yeah. And so he also told me that I cried every day on set. And for me, I didn't cry every day, but there were many days.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
To be honest with you, Kate and Stephen spoke to me about the project throughout filming. And so on the other side of the project, I would say, yeah, it's true. Everything has not been fixed. But there definitely have been some revelations, like I said, about understanding the motivations of my father. That has changed. That has definitely changed for me.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
Well, actually, let me rephrase that. It hasn't made me question what I do. It's made me question where what I do goes. So I don't question painting. I love that. That's like in my heart. It's the thing that I one of the things that I know that I was made for. But the reality is, as I said in that documentary, where I grew up, the place I grew up, does not look like the place where I am now.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
And the people who engage with my work often don't come from that world. And let me be clear here. I'm not just talking about race. I'm talking about class as well. I feel blessed to be able to do what I do every day. I mean, I make paintings and people pay me to do that. It's kind of ridiculous. It's like, let's just be honest. Let's just put that out there. It's kind of ridiculous.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
So I'm not complaining about that. But what I want is to figure out how I can get more access for folks.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
Yeah. As I said, I think I said in the film, the documentary, film is a much more democratically accessible medium. You don't have to be a rich man to go to a movie, you know? And nobody makes you feel uncomfortable when you walk into a movie theater. You can just walk in a movie, watch a movie. or, you know, eventually you'll be able to watch it in your home, you know. So...
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
That was incredibly important to me because as I went into more spaces, gallery spaces, I recognized how uncomfortable they are. This beautiful, big, white space where you are the only black face in that building. There is some fancy person sitting at the front desk, and you don't know whether, do I need to pay to get in? Do I need to talk to them? Do I need to say something?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
And then you see these paintings on the wall, and you're like, these are interesting, but I don't know anything about them. about them, you know, that kind of elitism that one feels when they're in those spaces doesn't help people connect to the art at all.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
Oh, wow, man. That's a good one. Wait a second, man. What do you think the teacher's going to look like this year? Oh, yeah. Teacher, stop that screaming. Teacher, don't you see? Don't want to be no uptown punk.