“Much of black history recorded in Western art is summarized visually by three roles: enslaved, in servitude, or impoverished. The works in this series look beyond the limited social order to personify a people of dignity and strength, whose survival is nothing less than miraculous.” ⁠ -Titus Kaphar ⁠ ⁠ Titus Kaphar’s artistic practice is rooted in the excavation of the past to illuminate the present. Kaphar cuts, bends, sculpts, and mixes the work of Renaissance and Colonial-era painters, creating formal games and new tales that exist somewhere between fact and fiction to uncover the legacy of historical, cultural, and personal erasure. Kaphar’s neoclassical painting presents a dark-skinned boy holding a parasol over a white adult, whose body is covered in muslin, save for a hand; the implied power structure of the relationship suggests that fear and loss are shared by both, but it is the larger figure whose identity is hidden, whose story is now erased, while the beatific looking boy...