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| Titus Kaphar, Enough About You (detail), 2016, |
(This is an old story but it’s new to me) A portrait (below) of Yale University’s namesake Elihu Yale shows four white men of means smoking and sipping madeira with Yale’s grandchildren playing behind them. In the corner of the canvas, a child of African descent pours wine for them. He wears fine red and grey clothes and— disturbingly—a silver collar around his neck.
The image of the enslaved child haunted artist Titus Kaphar when he first saw the portrait. In 2016 he painted Enough About You, which warps the 18th-century work beyond recognition, save for the boy’s portrait, without the padlocked collar and
framed in gold. Kaphar “wanted to find a way to imagine a life for this young man that the historical painting had never made space for in the composition: his desires, dreams, family, thoughts, hopes. Those things were never subjects that the original artist wanted the viewer to contemplate.”
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| Titus Kaphar, Enough About You, 2016 Photo by Richard Caspole / Collection of Arthur Lewis and Hau Nguyen |
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