Called “a fascinatingly layered piece…unusually occupied by questions of process and power,” SHUT UP AND PAINT (20 minutes, 2022) is a new documentary short about the Painter Titus Kaphar as he looks to film as a medium in the face of an insatiable art market seeking to silence his activism. SHUT UP AND PAINT was recently recognized as one of fifteen films to advance in the Documentary Short Film category for the 95th Academy Awards. This award-winning film received the Grand Jury Prize at both the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival and Independent Film Festival Boston. It was also selected for DOC NYC’s “Shortlist: Shorts” and is a Cinema Eye Honors nominee for Outstanding Nonfiction Short. A co-production of DCTV and Revolution Ready, SHUT UP AND PAINT is directed by Titus Kaphar and Alex Mallis, produced by Chloe Gbai, and executive produced by Matthew O’Neill and Perri Peltz.

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We are pleased to welcome Don Young from the Center for Asian American Media to introduce the film. Director and Producer Titus Kaphar and Director and Producer Alex Mallis will be in conversation with Art Historian Bridget R. Cooks following the screening. Everyone is invited to stay for a reception following the program.

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This is an in-person program at MoAD, masks are required throughout the museum.

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Titus Kaphar (b. 1976, Kalamazoo, Michigan) received an MFA from the Yale School of Art and is the recipient of a 2016 Robert R. Rauschenberg Artist as Activist grant, a 2018 Art for Justice Fund grant, and a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship, among others. Kaphar’s painting was featured on the cover of the June 15, 2020 issue of TIME. His lauded 2017 TED talk has received 2.8 million views to date. Kaphar’s work is included in the collections of Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, amongst others. Kaphar founded his production company Revolution Ready in 2019 and is currently working on two feature length films.

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Alex Mallis is a Cuban-American, Jewish filmmaker raised in New Hampshire now living in Brooklyn, NY. His films have been selected for multiple festivals internationally. Online, his work has been featured by The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Pitchfork, The Huffington Post, and Vimeo Staff Picks. His documentary series AMERICAN BOYBAND (2017) was broadcast on ViceTV. His short documentary SHUT UP AND PAINT (2022) was awarded the Grand Jury Prize Documentary Shorts at IFFBoston and the Grand Jury Prize Short Competition at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. Alex received an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College and is an active member of the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective and the Meerkat Media Collective.

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Bridget R. Cooks is a scholar and curator focused on the art of African Americans. She serves as Chancellor’s Fellow and Professor of African American Studies and Art History at the University of California, Irvine. Her books, articles, and essays can be found widely across interdisciplinary academic publications and art exhibition catalogues. She is most well-known as the author of the book, Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (UMass, 2011). Cooks has curated many art exhibitions including, Grafton Tyler Brown: Exploring California (2018) (Pasadena Museum of California Art); Ernie Barnes: A Retrospective (2019) (California African American Museum), The Black Index (2021-2) (national tour), and Lava Thomas: Homecoming (2022) (Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art). Her work has been awarded by the Ford Foundation, Southern Poverty Law Center, Getty Research Institute, California Humanities, the James A. Porter & David C. Driskell Book Award in African American Art History, and the Henry Luce Foundation.

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