Your Black Bloggers The official gathering spot for black bloggers
“The Jerome Project” began in 2011, when artist Titus Kaphar was researching his father Jerome’s prison records. Kaphar, who was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and currently lives between New York and Connecticut, creates artwork that, both aesthetically and thematically, sews together past and present in a rough and sometimes violent reworking of history. When looking into his father’s history, he was surprised to find 99 men, also incarcerated, who shared his father’s first and last names.
And just like that, the project was born. The series consists of oil portraits of the various Jeromes, based on their mug shots, juxtaposed against gold leaf, a nod to Byzantine paintings. Each face is partially submerged in tar, with the amount of tar vaguely corresponding to the amount of time the subject spent in prison. The tar also restores some privacy to the faces that was long denied them, while simultaneously alluding to the way their reputations were ruined as a result of their incarceration. The paintings appear both like royal portraits and long lost images drowning in garbage and gunk, the subjects’ mouths no longer able to communicate while the eyes speak volumes.
“What is the impact of our criminal justice system on our conception of democracy itself?” Kaphar asked in an interview with Hyperallergic. “What does it imply about us that we so easily strip the freedoms of our citizens of the values that we hold most sacred as a nation?”
