Artist Kate Capshaw captures the essence of her subjects in her recent exhibition, “Unaccompanied,” held at the Bo Bartlett Center on February 16th. Kate honors and brings attention to the stories and challenges of youths facing homelessness. Capshaw places her subjects in the forefront of the painting, drawing the viewer’s attention to the tilt of their smiles and the gleam in their eyes.

by Destinee Willimas

Kate Capshaw is an artist and retired actress that seeks to explore themes of memory, history, erasure, justice, and honoring stories that are yet to be heard through her art. After moving to New York to pursue her dreams of becoming an actress and eventually marrying director and writer Steven Spielberg in 1991, Capshaw has had an accomplished career of observing life and people to create meaningful and emotional stories. In 2009, she began her art studies, focusing primarily on drawing, painting, and portraiture, which led her to create “Unaccompanied” as a means of using art to raise public awareness of important and often overlooked social issues.

Capshaw’s exhibition “Unaccompanied” will be featured in the Bo Bartlett Center until May 12, 2023. Capshaw, who was mentored by artist Bo Bartlett, began the “Unaccompanied” project in 2016 as an exploration of the invisibility of young people experiencing homelessness and the United States’ growing population of homeless individuals. She began seeking out organizations and youth centers that were responding to the growing numbers and worked with them to meet with young people to create portraits.

“Unaccompanied” is comprised of 17 portraits and 16 studies that honor the stories of the individuals featured. Capshaw collaborated with sound artist Joshua-Michéle Ross to create a sensory experience through audio recordings to facilitate understanding between the subjects and the viewers by creating more dimensional profiles. Through the recordings, the voices and conversations of these individuals reveal some of their earliest memories and their hopes for the future.

The project, which originally only featured youths found in Capshaw's home city of Los Angeles, has expanded to seven other cities, including San Francisco, Fargo, Porcupine, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Chicago, and New York City, to shine a light on a variety of individuals.

In 2019, three of Capshaw’s portraits were chosen among the work of 44 fellow finalists and were exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. as part of the triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. The exhibit concluded its three-year tour in 2022 at the Kemper Museum in St. Louis, Missouri.

KATE CAPSHAW: UNACCOMPANIED EXHIBIT