Titus Kaphar is Taking his Art to the Big Screen

W hen a grievous harm has been done, there is a cultural impulse to demand forgiveness. It is a tidy and convenient notion, that all sins, no matter how grave, can and should be forgiven, that there can be closure to suffering. It also allows us to believe absolution might be possible for the wrongs we, ourselves, commit.

Artist Titus Kaphar’s extraordinary new film “Exhibiting Forgiveness,” in theaters on October 18, is a nuanced interrogation of forgiveness and to whom it is owed. In the film, visual artist Tarrell Rodin (André Holland) returns to his hometown with his wife, Aisha (Andra Day), and child to visit his mother, Joyce (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor). While he is there, Tarrell unexpectedly runs into his father, La’Ron (John Earl Jelks), who struggled with crack addiction throughout Tarrell’s childhood. Joyce plaintively encourages Tarrell to speak with La’Ron, to try and forge some kind of peaceable way forward. Tarrell is reluctant. There is, he makes clear, far too much scar tissue enveloping his fraught relationship with La’Ron.

In a fit of anger, Tarrell brings a camera into the basement where La’Ron lives, wanting to interrogate his father about his choices and their repercussions. It is a haunting scene, where bitter truths are laid bare. And it is all taken directly from Kaphar’s life, one of a series of moments comprising the genesis of the project.

A few years ago, Kaphar returned to Kalamazoo, Michigan, where he grew up, to visit his maternal grandmother, with whom he is very close. As he walked up to her house, he saw his father, Jerome, sitting on the stoop. They hadn’t seen each other or spoken in 15 years. Kaphar’s wife, Julianne, a nutritionist, didn’t even know who Kaphar’s father was. Immediately, Kaphar was upset and uninterested, but his grandmother insisted. And when you are close with your grandmother, you do what she says. Kaphar relented, but he had a condition—he wanted to film their conversation. He expected Jerome would say no and that would be that. Instead, Jerome agreed. Kaphar set up his camera and started asking Jerome the difficult questions that a child who has been failed by a parent needs to ask.

To Kaphar’s surprise, Jerome was initially repentant for his mistakes. But his son wasn’t open to receiving any repentance. “I was angry at myself for even contemplating…,” Kaphar says. “It really threw me off because I hadn’t dealt with my father in that way before.”

That footage inspired one of Kaphar’s best-known works, “The Jerome Project,” where he searched through prison records and found 97 men who shared his father’s name. He made portraits of the men, in the style of devotional icons, concealing parts of their faces with tar. The men are seen but also obscured—an apt metaphor for the ills of incarceration.

And still, Kaphar felt there was more work to be explored from the footage he shot of his father. Kaphar’s two young sons, now teenagers, had no relationship with their grandfather. They had questions about why Kaphar called his father by his first name. They wanted to know about Kaphar’s childhood, and the stories he shared about having a job at eight and nine years old. He turned to art to try and answer those questions, sketching and painting memories. And then, because he is a storyteller regardless of the medium with which he is working, Kaphar also started writing, piecing together his past and making it into something new. “The memories induced the writing, and the writing induced the paintings. Ultimately, my primary audience for my film was my family,” Kaphar says.

Kaphar, 48, is primarily a visual artist. His paintings, sculptures, mixed-media works and installations can be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Seattle Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia and others. In 2018, he was named a MacArthur fellow in recognition of his work. Kaphar deconstructs U.S. history, art history, the canon and African-American representation. He decenters the white gaze and recenters Black figuration. His first foray into moving pictures was the documentary “Shut Up and Paint,” in which he grappled with racism and an aversion to activism in the art world. The concerns he articulates in the film linger.

When I visit Kaphar in his studio in New Haven, Connecticut, the large, color-saturated canvases featured in “Exhibiting Forgiveness” are all on display. Soon, they will be part of an exhibition opening September 13 at Gagosian, Kaphar’s gallery, in LA. As we sit down to talk, Kaphar is skeptical. He asks why the magazine has chosen me to interview him. I understand the question he is really asking. Oftentimes, editors will simply pick any Black person to talk to another Black person, assuming that racial affinity is more than enough to create a connection. It is exhausting and condescending and often insulting, but this is not that. I offer my bona fides and share that I am not only a writer but also an art collector, and onward we go.

“Exhibiting Forgiveness” is a film that is both meditative and turbulent. The cast is uniformly outstanding, and John Earl Jelks’ performance as La’Ron is particularly vivid. Every time he is on screen, he becomes the film’s center of gravity, making it impossible to look away. And it’s clear that Kaphar has put his whole self into the movie, not only drawing from his own life, but taking real care in his creative choices. Because Kaphar has seen too many terrible movies about artists, he taught André Holland how to paint. “When you spend your life studying a craft and you are good at that thing, you are able to discern when another person is not,” Kaphar explains. He had Holland come to his studio and learn how to properly hold a paint brush. He encouraged Holland to engage the canvas with confidence. “‘You are God in this world,’” Kaphar says he told Holland. “‘You control everything, the light, the dark.’”

One of the most striking aspects of the film is that we never see active drug use. Though there is clearly domestic violence, we never directly see a Black woman being harmed or violated. And as with all the artistic choices in the film, this was deliberate. “I saw too much of it,” Kaphar explains. “I saw shit I can’t get out of my head. I didn’t want to put my actors through that. It was a struggle because you want to tell the truth, but it forced me to be more creative. Ultimately, I used abstraction as a tool.” Kaphar wields that tool deftly. There is no ambiguity in the depictions of addiction or violence, but there is no exploitation in those depictions, either.

The compassion Kaphar was able to show his cast and his audience is not necessarily something he has always been able to extend to himself. During a scene, also drawn from real life, La’Ron tells Tarrell that he looks like he wants to hit his father and Tarrell says, “I do, but I got way too much to lose. That’s not what this is about.” When he watched the scene back, Kaphar couldn’t stop sobbing. He heard his father’s voice in his head urging him to stop crying and still the tears came. He had to step away from set to gather himself.

“Watching what André did as an artist, to be able to embody someone else’s feelings so wholly, that made me have a sympathy for Tarrell I never really had for myself. I made this movie because I had to make this movie,” Kaphar says.

For people outside of major cities, access to art is limited. Rarely are art spaces, and particularly galleries, welcoming. Kaphar also hopes his film will bridge the gap between his community and the art world. “The community I grew up in couldn’t give a shit about the art world,” he says. When he screened the film this July at the Essence Festival of Culture in New Orleans, the audience responded enthusiastically, actively engaging with the film, which Kaphar found incredibly satisfying. “When you show it in a context with all Black people, everything is felt differently,” he says. “There’s a lot less translation.”

During the talkback after the screening, when Kaphar shared that he both directed the film and painted the artwork seen throughout, the audience responded with surprise. They simply didn’t know. Kaphar hopes to continue to bridge that gap but first, he says, he wants to know “we are going to be treated right in those spaces. Not until I know my folks aren’t going to go to the gallery to pick up a painting and have some foul shit happen.”

“Exhibiting Forgiveness” explores the sometimes fraught relationship between Black artists and white collectors, suggesting that some collectors assume they can take certain liberties when they own an artist’s work. In one scene, a collector wants to take a photo with Tarrell, who declines because he is in the middle of something else. Infuriated, the collector blusters about what he believes he is owed. Kaphar hasn’t necessarily reconciled that tension, of making work for his community, knowing his community isn’t always welcome in the art world, and also knowing that most of his work is sold to white collectors—but his mother offered him some clarity. “‘Our stories need to be told,’” he recalls her saying. “‘And how those people spend their money is their business. That has nothing to do with you. Your business is how you spend your money. What are you going to do?’”

To answer that question, in 2018, Kaphar co-founded NXTHVN, a nonprofit art incubator and community space, with investor Jason Price, who serves as the chairman of the board. The campus resides in the predominantly Black New Haven neighborhood of Dixwell. NXTHVN offers competitive fellowships, studio space, art exhibitions and more. During the pandemic, it offered vaccinations to the community. “We have an amazing Black community in New Haven. [NXTHVN] needed to be something that was for us, by us,” Kaphar says. He recalls a Black woman who, as she waited to be vaccinated, didn’t believe it was a Black-owned space. “It took some time to convince her that this wasn’t a secret Yale project,” he says. In many ways, New Haven is a company town. Kaphar, who received his MFA from Yale, does work with the university when he can and is open to more collaboration. “There is a cultural shift among the deans who are no longer willing to accept that Yale is just this mammoth of an entity inside the city but disconnected from it,” he says.

Running a nonprofit has been invigorating, but it has also come with a steep learning curve. “It’s very difficult to stay focused on the mission, the vision, the values of the organization,” he says. And still, Kaphar has grand ambitions. He and Price have also purchased properties around New Haven that they’ve fixed up and rented at reasonable prices. Instead of being satisfied with all he has accomplished, Kaphar wishes he could do more.

Like most wildly successful people, Kaphar has a lot going on. He makes art and films. He is a parent and a partner. He runs a nonprofit with a little property management on the side. His output makes you wonder if he has extra hours in his day not available to the rest of us. “This is a confession: I don’t know how to rest,” Kaphar says. “For so much of my life, I took pride in that, this inability to rest. All I know how to do is work. If it needs to get done, I’m going to do it. I’m almost 50 now, and I can’t keep doing that.”

One of the recurring themes in “Exhibiting Forgiveness” is that of labor. La’Ron, for all his faults, is a hard worker. And in the way that fathers do to their sons what was done to them, he instills that relentless work ethic in Tarrell. There is a scene, which is also rendered in a painting, of a boy pushing a lawnmower up a steep hill, desperate for help his father refuses to give. “Every single time my father and I interact, he tells that story,” Kaphar says. “It’s the proudest moment of his parenting. ‘I put steel in you.’” La’Ron tells Tarrell the same thing in the film. “The issue for me,” Kaphar says, “is I still hear my father’s voice in my head. When I get tired, I get mad at myself. My father is so proud of me. There is no doubt in my mind—never has there ever been, even with all the shit that went on—that my father loves me deeply and the only way he knows how, and the legacy he gave me is work.”

As a father himself, Kaphar is trying to give his sons a different legacy. “I have to believe kindness is better. I have to believe I live in a universe where love is better than the alternative. I would rather make mistakes in my practice as a father rooted in love.”

Which brings us back to forgiveness. There are no neatly resolved threads in “Exhibiting Forgiveness.” At the end of the movie, La’Ron goes to see Tarrell’s new art show and Tarrell gives his father a portrait he has made of La’Ron. It makes the ending something of a tabula rasa. Seen one way, Tarrell has forgiven his father, and the promise of a better, stronger relationship lingers. Seen another way, Tarrell has not forgiven La’Ron. Instead, there is ambiguity. We don’t know what will happen next between them. “At its core, fiction can get us to a truth that the data sometimes cannot. It was very important to me that Tarrell’s experience in the film reflect my truth, which is that the situation is complicated,” Kaphar says. “It’s called ‘Exhibiting Forgiveness’ for a reason.”