Considered cinema royalty for her marriage to one of Hollywood’s greatest directors, Kate Capshaw is a force to be reckoned with and a true inspiration in the art world.
Capshaw is best known for her role as Willie Scott in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, but in recent years has turned to portrait art.
Her latest exhibition, Unaccompanied, comprises portraits of homeless children and adolescents living in Los Angeles. Their faces emerge from a mass of dark, stepping out of a shadowy background with their clothes melting away into drips of colour.
According to the bipartisan policy research centre National Conference of State Legislatures, in the US, approximately 4.2 million children experience homelessness each year, around 700,000 of which are unaccompanied minors. The exhibition title uses the official government name for those minors: unaccompanied youth.
As an artist, Capshaw is deeply committed to revealing the crisis of homelessness in the US and uses her art to bring these forgotten children into the light, showing they are worthy of depiction.
Capshaw shares, “This is an ever growing community found in the tens of thousands in urban, suburban and rural areas across the nation. In most cases, they are not even responsible for their circumstances. Family trauma and inadequate social policies are the main drivers. My intention was to introduce the often hidden…in an intimate way.”
Born in Fort Worth and raised in Ferguson, Missouri, Capshaw spent a lot of her time in her early career sutting up educational programs for students with learning disabilities. Over the years, she’s become very familiar with foster care system in the US that often “swallows children whole.” Two years before she married Speilberg in 1989, she became a foster parent and adopted a song. After they wed, the couple adopted another. They have six children in total.
Unaccompanied features subjects, all of which Capshaw calls by name as she guides people around the gallery telling their stories. The children were found in shelters and youth homes and were told to wear whatever they felt comfortable in. Sessions usually lasted an hour and took place in an unused office space or storage area with no natural light.
Gallery director Kim Sajet and panting and sculpture curator at theSmithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery Dorothy Moss encouraged Capshaw to enter the prestigious Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition in 2019. Capshaw was a finalist and caught the eye of Michael McFalls, director of the Bo Barlett center who invited Capshaw to showcase the series at the gallery.
Main image: Kate Capshaw, Anubis, 2021
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