Titus Kaphar didn’t grow up visiting art museums. He didn’t even start seriously painting until he was in his 20s. But in each of his works, there’s a depth of history well beyond his years.

When his art history professor announced to the class that they would skip the section of their text on African art, Titus wasn’t shy about taking a stand and pointing out the slight he felt as the only black student present, but the class moved on anyway.

It was a galvanizing and crystallizing experience for the budding young artist in that it inspired him to create new artistic narratives that juxtaposed African faces with the images art historians DID focus on, and that it was such a microcosm of what he felt had happened in American art, history and culture all along: dark faces were simply left out of the picture.

So he didn’t just paint them back into our gaze, he painted them back into context. Titus’s art recreates historical artworks or events, and then dismantles, deconstructs and disfigures them to bring the black figures lost to the background and/or historical lies of omission into the light.

The best insight he gives on the content and shape of his work is in his opinion on the Confederate statue controversy: “We have this sort of binary conversation about keeping these sculptures up or taking them down. And I actually think that that binary conversation is problematic. I think there is another possibility that has to do with bringing in new work that speaks in conversation with this old work. It’s about a willingness to confront a very difficult past. There’s a third option.”

One of his most famous pieces, “Beyond the Myth of Benevolence,” puts that theory into practice. It’s a depiction of his symbolic intention to draw back the veil on the untold and intertwined stories of black and American history. Kaphar’s painting is actually two – the top canvas, a portrait of Thomas Jefferson, hangs from a corner of the frame, just barely obscuring a portrait of an enslaved black woman that’s fully secured on all four sides. The woman is not supposed to be Sally Hemings, Jefferson’s actual kept woman, but a symbol of all the black women of the past shrouded behind glorified whitewashing. The paintings engage in such a manner that neither has the same impact without the other. Which is, of course, precisely the point.

“I’m not in the business of trying to demonize our Founding Fathers. I don’t really think there’s any benefit to that. But I’m also not trying to deify them. [I’m] pulling back the curtain on these ideas, these illusions, these stories that we tell ourselves,” he explains.

And it’s a concept that’s resonated. In 2014, Titus was commissioned by TIME Magazine to create his piece “Yet Another Fight for Remembrance” in response to the Ferguson Protests. His art has appeared in prestigious galleries like the Yale University Art Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, and even in an installation at Princeton University where they’ve begun to acknowledge that many of their founders and leaders were also slave owners. In recognition of the historical significance and modern cultural relevance of his work, Titus was honored with the MacArthur Foundation’s “Genius Grant” just last year.

Though he recognizes that his art can be polarizing, he maintains that it’s not fueling a public controversy that’s his intention, especially since his art predates the current conversation, but conveying another layer of emotion and complexity that’s been left off-the-record. “I make paintings that people perceive often as being very social or political. But for the most part they are all very personal. Everything stems from my relationship to a situation, to a narrative, to a story.” And he uses that relationship to illustrate a truth that “all depictions are fiction” because the reality of the human condition is usually much more complicated than any artist can convey. “I think one of our challenges is that we sort of consistently try to make [art] in a way that it’s a sentence with a period at the end. And inevitably it’s not — it’s a comma, and there should be a clause after that.”

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