Sometimes what’s absent from a museum says more about history than what’s included. Two contemporary artists—Titus Kaphar, who is African-American, and Ken Gonzales-Day, who is Mexican-American—have spent their careers addressing this issue.
In the National Portrait Gallery’s newest exhibition, “Unseen: Our Past in a New Light,” the two artists take contrasting approaches—and work in two different mediums—to tell the stories of the missing and overlooked. The museum’s director Kim Sajet says Unseen hopefully will act as a town square. “It seeks to encourage discussion about history, how we remember, and how portraits can be a way to understand ourselves,” she says.
For centuries, portraiture—in America and elsewhere—has been devoted to the exposition of the lives of the rich, the famous, the royal, the historical, the heroic. But what about those Americans who didn’t get to have their portraits painted—because they were not white, or not a landowner, or a member of a wealthy family? What does art—and art history—say about them?
Unseen challenges portraiture’s tradition, says Asma Naeem, the Portrait Gallery’s curator of prints, drawing and media arts and a co-curator of the new exhibition. “Whose picture is shown on our walls? Who has been erased from history? Who hasn’t been shown?” The exclusions “can lead to different interpretations of history,” says Naeem.
Titus Kaphar’s approach is to amend history.
The 17 paintings and one sculpture in Unseen are the largest exhibition of the Yale-trained and New Haven, Connecticut-based artist’s works to date. One painting—Shred of Truth—has not previously been shown. He makes painstaking copies of historical paintings and then alters them—with a whitewash, with tar, by shredding or binding the canvas, by making paintings behind the paintings, to expose hidden truths. These are not one-dimensional, flat works.
Is Kaphar’s work the truth? Or is it his truth?