Advancing out of a gold-leaf background, Robinson’s image recalls that of iconographic Byzantine devotional portraits of holy figures. Entombed within the tar, Robinson is effectively silenced behind the thick layers of tar matter, a powerful and poignant metaphor, considering Robinson’s outspokenness towards racial injustice throughout his career and life. Robinson is recognized as a resilient and captivating icon of self-made success. An athletic champion who triumphed against deep-rooted racial prejudices in the 1950s. While speaking about his work, Kaphar shares, “We can’t erase this history; it’s real. We have to know it. I want to make paintings and sculptures that are honest, that wrestle with the struggles of our past but speak to the diversity and the advances of our present.” (T. Kaphar, quoted by J. Halprin Jackson, Artist and 2018 MacArthur Fellow Titus Kaphar, 2019).

My Jackie, Your Jackie is a quintessential example of Kaphar’s work, featuring some of the artist’s most emblematic motifs and materials: gold leaf, tar, and appended canvas. Executed in the same year Kaphar completed his iconic Jerome Project, a series of paintings depicting incarcerated black men who share his father’s name, on a similar gold-leaf background overlaid with varying degrees of tar to represent their sentence length, My Jackie, Your Jackie builds upon the artist’s exploration of tar as an artistic medium.