Artist Titus Kaphar Painted a Black Mother With the Silhouette of a Child for the Cover of TIME Magazine’s Protest Issue

The cover of this week’s issue
of TIME magazine, which includes a special report
dedicated to the protests that have erupted nationwide in the wake
of George Floyd’s killing by police in Minneapolis,
features a harrowing
cover by artist Titus Kaphar. 

The image, titled
Analogous
Colors, depicts a black
mother holding a silhouette of a child, which Kaphar created by
cutting into canvas. The image references Floyd calling out for his
mother during his arrest, as he was pinned to the ground and held
down by police officer Derek Chauvin for 8 minutes and 46
seconds.

The iconic red band surrounding the cover presents the names
of 35 black men and women who
have been killed by police or in other racist
killings, including
Floyd, Trayvon Martin, and Breonna Taylor. It marks the first time
the magazine’s signature
border has featured text.

To accompany the illustration on the cover, Kaphar wrote a poem
titled “I Cannot Sell You
This Painting,” in which
he asks: “Are black and loss / analogous colors in
America?”

“In her expression, I see the
Black mothers who are unseen, and rendered helpless in this fury
against their babies,” he writes in the piece. “As I listlessly
wade through another cycle of violence against Black people, / I
paint a Black mother… / eyes closed, / furrowed brow, / holding the
contour of her loss.”

“I have given up trying to
describe the feeling of knowing that I can not be safe in the
country of my birth,” Kaphar writes, noting that neither his
prestigious MacArthur grant nor his MFA degree from Yale University
grant him safety from racial violence.

“This Black mother understands
the fire,” he writes. “Black mothers / understand despair. / I can
change NOTHING in this world, / but in paint, / I can realize her….
/  This brings me solace… / not hope, / but
solace/ She walks me
through the flames of rage.”

The issue’s cover story
details the aftermath of Floyd’s
murder, from the protests in Minneapolis and in over 150 cities
across the country, to the widely decried response to the
demonstrations by President Donald Trump, who last week threatened
protestors by saying: “When the looting starts, the shooting
starts.”

But the cover is not without its critics. On Twitter, writer
Kimberly Drew asked why the name of Tony McDade, the black
transgender man who was killed by police in Tallahassee, Florida,
on May 27, was not included on the cover.

This is the second cover by Kaphar for TIME. In
2014, he contributed an illustration of a group of
protestors for an issue covering the demonstrations
that followed the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson,
Missouri.

The post Artist Titus Kaphar Painted a Black Mother With the
Silhouette of a Child for the Cover of TIME Magazine’s Protest
Issue appeared first on artnet News.