What’s Happening: The acclaimed painter wrestles with art-world racism in Shut Up and Paint, his directorial debut that explains his recent foray into filmmaking—and proves his message won’t be restricted to his medium.

The Download: Titus Kaphar’s rise to art-world stardom has been nothing short of meteoric. After earning his MFA at Yale University, he began painting canvases that wrestle with racism and the lack of representation of people of color in the Western art canon. One series renders mugshots of incarcerated Black men in gold leaf, partly submerged in tar based on how much time each man spent in prison. Another subdues young Black protesters in aggressive strokes of white paint, suggesting attempts to silence them. His paintings have appeared on the cover of Time magazine twice, landed him a coveted residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and earned him a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship.

Despite his success, a void remained. “Ninety percent of what I sell doesn’t go into Black or brown homes,” Kaphar explains to his dealer in Shut Up and Paint, a 20-minute-long short film that marks the artist’s directorial debut about how the insatiable art market seeks to silence his activism.

The scene follows a walkthrough of “In From a Tropical Space,” his critically acclaimed, sold-out solo exhibition at Gagosian from 2020, where he presented paintings whose haunting narratives explore mass incarceration. Each canvas depicts a forlorn Black mother with the blank silhouette of her child that Kaphar excised from the canvas, leaving only the gallery wall underneath. One painting appeared on the cover of Time’s protest issue that summer following the murder of George Floyd.

The paintings read political, but they take on a deeply personal note for Kaphar—and scores of Black Americans grieving loved ones lost to police brutality and mass incarceration. “I was thinking about my cousin who died in prison last year,” Kaphar told Artnet News. “And my other cousin who’s in prison right now. And my father, who has been in and out my whole life. So as an artist, I’m not out to make activist paintings. I’m trying to make sense of some stuff for myself, and put it on canvas.”

But the people who may resonate most with his message, Kaphar realizes, lack the means to buy his canvases—nor are many going to museums and galleries, which have long excluded Black narratives within their walls. Though his collectors are mostly white, a European dealer tells Kaphar during one of the documentary’s more gripping scenes, his work’s activist bent is discomfiting and he should instead simply focus on the work. “He said point blank, ‘shut up and paint,’” said the film’s co-director Alex Mallis. “That was very jarring.”

This may explain why Kaphar has branched into filmmaking—a medium whose message will more easily reach those who need to hear it. “If you realize, in shouting your message, that it’s not reaching the community that you want to reach, you have to find a strategy for getting that message to them as well,” he says. “That might mean changing my medium to be able to have a dialogue with folks.” He’s well on his way. Kaphar signed with Hollywood talent agency UTA after wrapping production on Shut Up and Paint, and is currently shooting his debut narrative feature film, Exhibiting Forgiveness, chronicling his struggle of balancing the art world and the community close to his heart.

Kaphar is already doing so. Struck by the needs of Dixwell, a once-thriving African-American neighborhood in a post-industrial part of New Haven, Connecticut, near Yale, he co-founded NXTHVN, a $12 million nonprofit arts incubator and fellowship to nurture rising talents. The program aims to accelerate the careers of artists of color who may otherwise be unfamiliar with the art world’s opaque machinations. (Studio management, production, and gallery relationships are all on the agenda.) Since 2019, it has welcomed seven artists and two curators annually, offering them a stipend, state-of-the-art facilities (two derelict factory buildings restored by Deborah Berke), and access to a global network of creative talent.

In Their Own Words: “The conversation that Black artists have been having is that our work exists in white spaces, in white people’s houses,” Kaphar explains in the film. “They become separate from us, and disconnected from us, in a way that just feels not just.”

Surface Says: The fallout from Laura Ingraham’s infamous demand that LeBron James “shut up and dribble” continues to deliver sweet rewards.

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From the whitewashed villages of the Algarve to creative energy–filled Lisbon to the increasingly stylish beach town of Melides, Portugal’s hotel scene continues to evolve in spectacular ways. This week, we’re surveying the landscape.

Inspired by 19th-century Portuguese explorers Roberto Ivens and Hermenegildo Capelo’s voyages to Zaire and Mozambique, this 87-key property feels like a world away from its location in Lisbon’s central Chiado neighborhood. Housed inside the city’s historic Rádio Renascença broadcasting building, near landmarks like historic Rossio Square and ancient São Jorge Castle, interior designer Cristina Matos nods to the hotel’s muse with African-print wallpaper depicting jungly landscapes, bronze flamingo lamps, and vintage travel books.

Catalan architect Lázaro Rosa-Violán washed the culinary spaces in a maximalist deco aesthetic. The fulcrum is the ornate Gastro Bar, where guests on floral-backed barstools order from an extensive Negroni list surrounded by floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with bottles of wine. An adjacent alcove hosts the Mediterranean-style Crudo Bar, the place for shellfish, champagne, and nautical keepsakes. Downstairs, the Neapolitan osteria Rocco is awash in midcentury glam. Standout dishes include the lobster linguine, mushroom and truffle tagliatelle served in a pecorino cheese wheel, and ossobuco with saffron risotto.

On a recent night in New York City, Emily Adams Bode Aujla and Jean Prounis created a veritable cabaret fever-dream inside Upper East Side haunt Orsay. The occasion was the launch of their new 11-piece capsule collection. Their shared source of inspiration, according to Bode Aujla, was “a damask tablecloth” from the city’s erstwhile Versailles Supper Club. Founded by Prounis’ family, the institution hosted the likes of Edith Piaf and Judy Garland during its two-decade run. From that archival tablecloth, the duo created an eight-piece clothing collection using textile reproductions. The capsule also features three pieces of fine jewelry designed by Prounis.

The clothing range, which includes shirts, a tunic, pants, boxer shorts, and a scarf, includes hardware and ornamentation Bode Aujla describes as “reminiscent of Etruscan granulation.” The designer told the New York Times the collaboration was a natural fit for the two. “So much of our brands are about heritage and family history. This idea of preservation is very much part of what we do.”

When: Until May 21

Where: Tate Modern, London

What: Hanging from the ceiling like eerie apparitions, the late Polish sculptor’s ghostly Abakans have lost none of their power despite being first exhibited in the 1960s. Woven using sisal, wool, hemp rope, and organic materials, each textile work is autobiographical, referencing crucial junctures in Abakanowicz’s life. Two free-hanging cloth sculptures recall encroaching Soviet censorship while she studied at Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts; others reckon with her mother’s violent assault by Soviet forces. They come together in a forest-like display that casts ominous shadows throughout the gallery, which caused one critic to “audibly gasp.”

When it comes to sustainability, we often view the diminishing ozone layer and the scourge of microplastics as topics of utmost concern. Less frequently acknowledged is e-waste, the onslaught of phones, laptops, televisions, and other electronics we blithely discard when their newer, sleeker iterations hit shelves. Though wireless technology advances mean fewer cords, humanity generated a record 59 million tons of e-waste in 2019 alone—a number the Natural Resources Defense Council expects will increase 30 percent over the next decade. These materials often contain such toxic metals as lead, mercury, and nickel, which can cause respiratory and cardiovascular disease with too much exposure.

Given that planned obsolescence is a key strategy of many electronics companies, what are they doing to combat e-waste? Apple, the tech juggernaut that sells 240 million iPhones per year, has been developing a de-manufacturing robot that can take apart iPhones and recycle interior metals like gold and tungsten. It launched in 2016 as Liam, which could disassemble an iPhone 5S in 12 minutes. After some improvements, Liam relaunched two years later as Daisy, a state-of-the-art robot that can process 23 different models in as little as 18 seconds.

A design company founded in 1976, Magis guarantees high quality by manufacturing all its products in Italy. This is in line with the firm’s tradition, which developed from its craft and cultural roots, as well as from the evolving styles and industrial growth of the 1980s and ’90s.

Surface Says: Magis products embody daring contemporary design—from Konstantin Grcic’s Chair One to Thomas Heatherwick’s Spun chair.

An eerily lifelike Yayoi Kusama robot is painting inside Louis Vuitton New York.

The internet can’t get enough of this clever wall artwork-turned-desk.

San Luis Obispo is paying people to eat in the city throughout all of January.

Young people are increasingly forgoing new tech for dated digital cameras.