Titus Kaphar - New Now New York Tuesday, September 28, 2021 | Phillips

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  • The Jerome Project

     

    The Jerome Project began with a personal investigation. Searching for his estranged father Jerome, Titus Kaphar scanned records for any information relating to his whereabouts. Kaphar’s search was unsuccessful, but it led to an important breakthrough: combing through incarceration records, Kaphar discovered scores of mugshots of men who shared his father’s first and last name. The search blossomed into The Jerome Project, a years-long interest in and investigation of the American prison system. Kaphar considered “[his] father’s name as a kind of a doorway into this bigger, broader issue of the Prison Industrial Complex,” and his personal research project evolved into an artistic endeavor with the debut of The Jerome Project at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2014.1 The Jerome Project (Asphalt and Chalk) XIII, a chalk on asphalt paper product of Kaphar’s investigation, reticently confronts the incongruities of the modern criminal justice system.

    "That moment of confusion where you are trying to manage the reality of beauty and incarceration is part of the project’s goal." —Titus Kaphar

    Kaphar’s work often questions the nature of history and its representations in the past and present, but the present work forcefully shifts the focus to the contemporary by bringing to light the iniquities of the criminal justice system. The Jerome Project (Asphalt and Chalk) XIII implores viewers to reconsider the realities of contemporary incarceration and its effects on the African American community. 


    1 Bill Keller, “Titus Kaphar on Art, Race and Justice”, The Marshall Project, February 1, 2017, online
     

    • Provenance

      Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
      Acquired from the above by the present owner

    • Artist Biography

      Titus Kaphar

      Titus Kaphar’s work questions the nature of history and its representations in the past and today. By altering the materiality of his paintings, sculptures, and installations, Kaphar subverts conventional understandings of historical representations and exposes the uncomfortable and troubling realities of the racism in America’s past. Kaphar’s examinations of historical representations and the omissions of such representations encourage viewers to question their own relationships to history and understandings of the past. He strives to dislodge history from the past and to promote its relevance in the world today. 

      Kaphar’s work has received considerable acclaim, and his paintings have graced two covers of Time magazine. He is the recipient of a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship and his work is represented in such institutions as the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, and the Perez Art Museum Miami. He lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut.

       
      View More Works

33

The Jerome Project (Asphalt and Chalk) XIII

signed and dated "Titus Kaphar 15" on the reverse
chalk on asphalt paper
49 x 35 5/8 in. (124.5 x 90.5 cm)
Executed in 2015.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$50,000 - 70,000 

Sold for $100,800

Contact Specialist

Patrizia Koenig

Head of New Now Sale

212 940 1279

pkoenig@phillips.com

New Now

New York Auction 28 September 2021