Contour of Loss

2020

Not on view

With his cut-canvas painting Contour of Loss, Titus Kaphar deploys the pictorial tropes of art history to represent a current-day Black mother grappling with the loss of her child due to racially charged forces of recent American history. This despairing figure evokes Renaissance and Baroque madonnas and pietàs, while her rare portrayal as a Black woman with her own child refuses the archetypal servant caring for the children of an employer or enslaver. The excision of the lost child, cut out with a razor blade, references the causal factors of gun, police and environmental violence, leaving only the shadows of the child’s bodily contours projected against a metaphorically white wall.

Artwork Details

Overview

Inscriptions and Markings

Provenance

Exhibition History

Title: Contour of Loss
Artist: Titus Kaphar (American, born Kalamazoo, Michigan, 1976)
Date: 2020
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 66 × 60 in. (167.6 × 152.4 cm)
Classification: Paintings
Credit Line: Gift of the Hartland and Mackie Family, 2021
Object Number: 2021.73
Rights and Reproduction: © Titus Kaphar
Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art

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