Summer Series: Ranch Week Honoree Titus Kaphar in conversation with Debi Wisch

Titus Kaphar

2025 International Artist Honoree
& Summer Series Speaker

Titus Kaphar is an artist whose paintings, sculptures, and installations examine the history of representation by transforming its styles and mediums with formal innovations to emphasize the physicality and dimensionality of the canvas and materials themselves. His practice seeks to dislodge history from its status as the “past” in order to unearth its contemporary relevance. He cuts, crumples, shrouds, shreds, stitches, tars, twists, binds, erases, breaks, tears, and turns the paintings and sculptures he creates, reconfiguring them into works that reveal unspoken truths about the nature of history. Open areas become active absences; walls enter into the portraits; stretcher bars are exposed; and structures that are typically invisible underneath, behind, or inside the canvas are laid bare to reveal the interiors of the work.  In so doing, Kaphar’s aim is to reveal something of what has been lost and to investigate the power of a rewritten history. Titus Kaphar (b. 1976, Kalamazoo, Michigan) lives and works in New Haven, CT. Kaphar received an MFA from the Yale School of Art and is a distinguished recipient of numerous prizes and awards including a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2018 Art for Justice Fund grant, a 2016 Robert R. Rauschenberg Artist as Activist grant, and a 2015 Creative Capital grant. Kaphar’s work, Analogous Colors, was featured on the cover of the June 15, 2020 issue of TIME. He gave a TED talk at the annual conference in Vancouver 2017, where he completed a whitewash painting, Shifting the Gaze, onstage. Kaphar’s work has been included in solo exhibitions at Seattle Art Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, MoMA PS1 and National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, among others. His work is included in the collections of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; the 21C Museum Collection; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, amongst others. Kaphar’s commitment to social engagement has led him to move beyond traditional modes of artistic expression to establish NXTHVN. NXTHVN is a new national arts model that empowers emerging artists and curators of color through education and access. Through intergenerational mentorship, professional development and cross-sector collaboration, NXTHVN accelerates professional careers in the arts. Now in its fifth year of operation, NXTHVN encourages artists, art professionals, and local entrepreneurs to expand New Haven’s growing creative community.

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Debi Wisch

Debi Wisch is an acclaimed documentary film producer known for her art-focused projects. She has earned numerous honors including an Emmy nomination for the critically-lauded The Price of Everything. The film premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and was later licensed by HBO and 50 international markets. Wisch also produced the award-winning documentary The Art of Making It, which gave a behind-the-scenes look at emerging artists and won the Audience Award at SXSW 2022 and Love, Cecil, a biopic about Cecil Beaton, which premiered at the 2016 Telluride Film Festival. She premiered Crossing the River, a documentary short about the world’s oldest living Holocaust survivor siblings, in 2024. Currently, Wisch is completing a biopic on the trailblazing artist and activist Marilyn Minter, that will premiere this Fall. She is also producing Bury Me Standing, which examines the past, present and future of Confederate monuments through the prism of renowned curator Hamza Walker’s 2025 exhibition MONUMENTS, which will premiere in early 2026. Additionally, Wisch is producing A Test of Civilization, a documentary thriller revisiting the events leading up to World War II that definitively shows who knew what when. Beyond her production work, Wisch serves on the boards of several arts organizations including YoungArts, Film at Lincoln Center, the Director’s Advisory Board at Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center and the public art board at Stanford University. She is also on the Tate’s North American Acquisition Committee and the Serpentine’s American Committee and supports numerous organizations that specifically focus on emerging artists and arts education.

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