This week on Open Studio, Jared Bowen sits down with artist Titus Kaphar and visits the American Heritage Museum.
Kaphar has an exhibit at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum titled "The Jerome Project," through which he uses gold and tar to tell the story of incarcerated men. When he was Googling his own father, Kaphar found his mug shot— and the mug shots of nearly 100 other Black men with the same name as his father, Jerome. Kaphar recreated portraits of these incarcerated men using varying levels of tar to obscure their faces to relay the length of their sentences, thereby reckoning with both his own personal history and how mass incarceration affects society.
From there, to mark Veterans Day, we visit the American Heritage Museum in Hudson, Mass. While this museum is as large as several airplane hangars, and home to over 50 tanks and military vehicles, it is really an anti-war museum, which asks visitors to contemplate the ravages of war.
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