Contour of Loss
Titus Kaphar American
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.
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