Artists Peer Between The Words

On one wall of NXTHVN’s gallery is a possibly already-iconic painting: A Black mother, eyes closed, her hair kept from her face by a headband, cradling only the silhouette of a baby. New Haven-based artist Titus Kaphar painted it in reaction to the killing of George Floyd, and in June it ended up being on the cover of Time magazine.

Facing that image, on the opposite wall, are a series of black pieces of paper that contain faces and words and crossed out lines. One side of the gallery is a short shock; the other is a lake of layers to sink into.

Together, they make up ​“Pleading Freedom,” a small but deep exhibition of work by Kaphar in collaboration with memoirist, poet, and attorney Reginald Dwayne Betts that has much to say about the condition of being Black in America at a time when people’s ears are prepared to hear that message as much as they have been in a generation.

“Pleading Freedom,” which runs at NXTHVN on Henry Street through Sept. 26, pulls its power from juxtaposing two distinct threads of work that happen to work very well together.

Kaphar created the paintings Yet another fight for remembrance (study) and Analogous colors in 2014 and 2020, respectively. Both were featured in Time magazine in the context of ​“civil unrest in the face of systemic violence against Black and brown people,” as the accompanying notes state. The pieces by Kaphar and Betts first appeared under the title ​“Redaction,” and were exhibited at MoMA PS1 in 2019.

Kaphar’s paintings grab the eye upon entry to the gallery space. Large, colorful, and forceful, they command attention — in some case, not only for their craft and their subject matter, but because the imagery has taken on additional resonance in the Covid-19 era, when almost everyone (at least in New Haven) is currently wearing masks most of the time outside. Protestors may wear masks for political and practical reasons, but there is a way that wearing a mask now is also a kind of protest, a stern vote in favor of science and compassion for others in the face of mixed messages from national leadership.

Similarly, in Kaphar’s State Number Two, the ​“mask” covering the lower half of the subject’s face is a thick tar that looks to be all but drowning the subject. It was painted before the pandemic started, but now can be understood as a potent statement on the ways in which Black and Brown people have been hit disproportionately harder by the virus. The protests against racial justice may have allowed many voices to be heard, yet sickness and death have silenced too many others.

In the NXTHVN gallery space, Kaphar’s paintings might require you to take a step back to take them in. By contrast, the collaborative works between Kaphar and Betts invite you to move in close. It first appears as a grid of black paper, but it’s apparent there’s much more afoot.

The accompanying notes explain that Kaphar and Betts are ​“focusing on the ways that state and federal court systems exploit and erase the poor and incarcerated from public consciousness. Redacted works on paper feature poetry by Betts in combination with Kaphar’s etched portraits of incarcerated individuals, and draw inspiration and source material from lawsuits filed by Alec Karakastanis of the Civil Rights Corps (CRC) on behalf of people incarcerated because of an inability to pay court fines and fees. Betts utilizes the legal strategy of redaction to craft verse out of legal documents, capturing the complicated and pervasive effects of time spent incarcerated.”

The combination of elements is highly effective. Kaphar’s portraits peer out from darkness, from in between the lines of redacted prose that take on echoes of the bars of a prison cell. The grid of papers on the wall could be a cell block. They also function as a labyrinth, an echo of the legal system that they all try to navigate while remaining incarcerated. Betts’s writings and redactions make bitterly absurdist poetry out of the legalese: ​“The City kept a human / in its jail / the person / pleaded / poverty / held / indefinitely / threatened abused / left to languish / frightened family could / buy their freedom,” one page reads, while the face of a human being struggles for recognition underneath it.

Having established the parameters of their collaboration, Kaphar and Betts mine the possible combinations of elements for maximum impact. Somewhere in the grid of papers is a face with no words or bars in the way, but that person is still trapped, in the same cell block, with everyone else. Elsewhere, the redacted lines have been dropped and the unredacted words remain, floating in space, disjointed. But perhaps the most chilling panel is one that takes time to find, where all the words have been redacted, and the lines cross thick and strong over the pleading person’s face. For this person, the legal system, and even language itself, has failed. This person is trapped, and there are no more words to describe it, as if they’ve all been used up.

Pleading Freedom runs through Sept. 26. NXTHVN, located at 169 Henry St., is currently open on Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. Visitors must sign in for contact tracing. No more than seven people are allowed in the gallery at once and masks are required. Visit NXTHVN’s website for more information.