Titus Kaphar
speaker
40 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Titus Kaphar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I did, yeah.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Still.
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.
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.
So I'm not complaining about that. But what I want is to figure out how I can get more access for folks.
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...
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?
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.
Thank you.
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