Photo from Gagosian.
The fight for racial equality has continued and changed in the 21st century, but artists continue to be essential in their contributions where they often channel frustrations to raise awareness and represent this struggle through their creations. Painter and filmmaker Titus Kaphar is one of those artists. His 2014 piece The Jerome Project is a personal, yet encompassing piece which highlights the people affected by the historic and continuing epidemic of mass incarceration in the United States.
Born in 1976 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Titus Kaphar didn’t find passion in art until university. At a junior college in California, Kaphar registered for an art survey class, in hopes to impress his future wife, but when the professor announced that they would be skipping over the “black people in art” section, he was outraged. Kaphar went on to receive an MFA from the Yale School of Art. Thus, from the very beginning of his career, Kaphar had used his voice to go against the grain. He rejects the white, myopic canon that often overwhelms the arts world and instead centers historically suppressed Black perspectives. He first gained mainstream recognition when Time Magazine commissioned a piece, titled Yet Another Fight for Remembrance after the Ferguson, Michigan unrest. Titus Kaphar uses his work to raise awareness to the unique experiences of Black people in America, both historically and presently, so Americans may better understand the systematic abuse Black people suffer and join the struggle against that abuse.
Mass incarceration and its disproportionate effect on Black people is just one of the topics Kaphar has delved into in his body of work—exemplified in his 2014 The Jerome Project. In researching incarceration and its predecessor slavery, Kim Gilmore notes, “This year the U.S. prison population cascaded past 2,000,000 … Prison populations continue to be disproportionately African American and Latino.” The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world as well as of any independent democracy worldwide and in that prison population, Black men are astoundingly overrepresented in comparison to their general population in the U.S. One in five Black men born in 2001 is likely to be incarcerated at some point in their lifetime, but in 2019, Black men represented a third of the total U.S. prison population. The free labor of prisoners and the economic reliance the United States has on that labor, paired with the staggering overrepresentation of men of color in prison, is all too reminiscent of slavery. Our carceral system is acutely interested in punitive measures, rather than a rehabilitative approach; the prison industrial system has incredibly negative downstream effects for those incarcerated as well as their families. These statistics reveal the immense shortcomings and racist inheritance of the American police, justice, and prison systems.
Kaphar lays this reality bare in The Jerome Project. Kaphar was inspired to create The Jerome Project after he looked into the prison records of his estranged father, Jerome, in 2011 and discovered almost a hundred Black incarcerated men with the same exact name. In this piece, Kaphar utilizes saintly motifs, the medium of tar, and the repetition of the Jeromes to convey the racist injustice of the American carcel system.
Titus Kaphar, Jerome LXI, 2020.
Kaphar created sixty-five portraits of the Jeromes, each submerged in an amount of tar based on the time they spent in prison. Each Jerome has an unique identity, distinct with particular features, and is portrayed on a Byzantine style devotional painting, complete with gold leaf in the background. The choice to depict incarcerated Black men, often portrayed as irredeemable and worthless, in a style traditionally reserved for religious saints is subversively powerful. Kaphar venerates each Jerome and thus elevates them to holy status, and in turn rejects the idea that incarcerated people are unworthy of respect or love.
Kaphar’s use of tar as a shroud engulfing each Jerome’s face acts as a metaphor for the loss of personhood that incarceration creates for those in prison. The tar disrupts the divine image Kaphar crafts of the Jeromes and conceals the most distinctive
thing about each person —their face and voice—just as their prison sentence separates them from their humanity. Fifteen of the portraits are currently on display at the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum in Boston, MA. While the level of tar on each portrait was initially meant to reflect how much of his life each man had spent in prison, Kaphar later abandoned this formula in acknowledgment that time in prison is only the beginning of how incarceration impacts incarcerated people’s lives. For the rest of their lives, individuals can struggle with employment, housing, social alienation, voting rights, access to government assistance and more after incarceration.
The scale of this project which included sixty-five individual portraits of Black incarcerated men, all named Jerome, speaks to how widespread the racism within the American justice system truly is. Kaphar only began this project in search of his own father, but his Jerome is just one of many incarcerated, one of many affected by the American prison industrial complex. Each portrait is 10 by 7 by 1 inch; each man is depicted in an image barely larger than a sheet of paper, but the astounding quantity of portraits when on display overwhelms the viewer. These men are made invisible by the tar, by incarceration, yet America heavily relies on their labor—in 2024, 42% of California’s total emergency response hours were contributed by incarcerated fire crews who are paid $1 per hour when assigned to active fire incidents. Kaphar’s allusions to Byzantine icons, use of tar, and the scale of The Jerome Project, illuminate the racist corruption of the American prison system and share a fresh, more humanizing view of incarcerated individuals.
In The Jerome Project, Kaphar lays bare the pain many Black Americans experience as victims of the prison and policing system. This piece acts as a moment of silence for the people subjected to systemic racism, often ignored but now brought to light in this style with allusions to religious reverence and remembrance. This piece was created more than ten years ago, but unfortunately feels ever relevant even today. Both prison and police reform remain prioritized as points of necessary change in America, though this work is not nearly complete. In examining The Jerome Project, one is introduced to incarcerated individuals with compassion and humanity; Kaphar asks the viewer: do you know these people? Could they be your neighbors, friends, your own father? Why do we allow these individuals to be covered in this metaphorical tar?
Kaphar continues to be a notable voice in the arts world; his most recent exhibition titled “The Fire Next Time” was held in the rue de Ponthieu gallery in Paris from January 29-March 7, 2026 and was meant as a retroactive look back on “the symbolic role of the American presidency at a moment when [madness] is again at center stage.”
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Katina Handrinos is a sophomore studying Film and Visual Media as well as Dramaturgy. She is a copy editor for the Policy and Law Review and is also involved with Women’s Club Basketball and the Hellenic Student Association.
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