Titus Kaphar valuation
Paints in the manner of early American portraits, then cuts, peels and tars the canvas to show who the portrait left out.
Titus Kaphar was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1976 and studied at the Yale School of Art. His paintings borrow the look of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American portraiture and then intervene in it — canvases cut away, crumpled, stitched, nailed or partly sealed under tar — so that the people history pushed to the margins come back into view. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2018, co-founded the NXTHVN arts incubator in New Haven, and his painting of a Black mother holding the cut-out absence of her child was a Time cover in 2020.
What comes to market is mostly paintings and works on paper, with a smaller number of editioned prints. Because so many of the works are physically altered — cut, layered, folded or built out from the wall — condition and structure matter more than they would with a flat canvas, and an honest condition report has to tell the artist's intervention apart from damage. Unique works normally carry provenance through his galleries, and title, date and dimensions should match their records. Editions are signed and numbered, and the margins and publisher's details are what identify them.
What a work by Titus Kaphar is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the UK.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
