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.