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.
What a work by Titus Kaphar is worth
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Bio
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.
San José, Time and Exhibiting Forgiveness
Kaphar came to art through a junior college art history course and taught himself to paint by visiting museums. He took his BFA at San José State University in 2001 before Yale. In 2014 Time commissioned a painting from him in response to the Ferguson protests, made in his manner of painting over his own work in white.
Behind the Myth of Benevolence was damaged three times while on view at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, and the museum posted guards beside it for the rest of the exhibition. His first feature film as director, Exhibiting Forgiveness, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2024. His work is in the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum.
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.
