As an actor, Kate Capshaw used to play other people: a nightclub singer in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, a divorced bookseller in The Love Letter, a beleaguered bride headed out West in a covered wagon in The Quick and the Dead. Now, she paints them. Capshaw paints all sorts of people.
But since 2016, she has focused on the kinds of individuals who rarely see themselves reflected in portraiture. Her subjects include the homeless, the underprivileged, and the previously incarcerated. Her portraits are direct, clear-eyed, full of empathy. Her latest, “Exclusive Tonsorial Services,” on view at the Pérez Art Museum Miami until January 19, 2025, depicts local barber Sergei “Sir.J” Grant. Yesterday, John Travolta was spotted perusing her installation, but Capshaw looks beyond Hollywood for her subjects.
“I’m interested in painting people who have not had their story told,” Capshaw, 71, said during a Zoom call last week, to discuss her Miami debut, which runs at the Pérez through Jan. 19, 2025. “I do think of painting as a kind of story.”
An installation view from “Exclusive Tonsorial Services.” Courtesy of Pérez Art Museum Miami.
A beloved fixture in Miami-Dade County, Grant first picked up a pair of shears about 10 years ago, when he was homeless and struggling to pay child support. Now, he not only cuts hair, but mentors young people all over Miami. Capshaw met Grant earlier this year, after Pérez Director Franklin Sirmans approached her about painting his portrait. “I was a little nervous,” Capshaw recalled. “I don’t talk to the subjects before I meet them, they come into the space where I’m going to paint them. But Sir.J came in with that giant smile, with such a beautiful energy.”
That energy comes through in Capshaw’s finished 64″x54″ oil painting. It shows Grant sitting, hands folded, in a brown leather chair against a vibrant sea-green background. He wears a white short-sleeved smock embroidered with scissors, khaki pants, and clear-framed glasses. His long braids spill over one shoulder, his smile is exuberant. He looks utterly comfortable, yet also about to burst with joy. “The guy is amazing,” Capshaw said. “He is indefatigable. He is giving so much back. And I wanted to capture that.”
An installation view from “Exclusive Tonsorial Services.” Courtesy of Pérez Art Museum Miami.
When it comes to art, Capshaw is a late bloomer. She grew up in Ferguson, Missouri, in the 1960s, in a cash-strapped school that didn’t offer electives like speech, home economics, or art. “There was not a lot of funding, so by the time I got to junior high, they had pulled all of the art programs,” she said. “It wasn’t until I came to New York City that I realized that there were museums!”
Capshaw actually earned a masters in special education and helped set up programs for kids with learning disabilities in rural Missouri. But in the late 1970s, she moved to New York to pursue acting. She shot to fame in 1984 after playing the love interest in the second Indiana Jones movie, directed by Steven Spielberg, whom she would marry in 1991. It was actually Spielberg who encouraged Capshaw to pursue painting, after seeing the incredible drawings their children would bring home from school. Spielberg may be able to wield a camera, but “he can’t draw,” Capshaw noted. “He said, ‘This might be coming from your side — have you ever taken a class?’”
She signed up for her first one in 2001 with her then-14-year-old daughter. “We were drawing naked ladies and men together—it was a lot of fun,” she said. “But once I started those classes, I knew that this was a place I needed to be and wanted to be. It just felt joyous.”
Capshaw was in her mid-50s, and she continued working on her craft. She was drawn to “faces,” to other people. “I think I had an intuitive feel for capturing the feeling of a person,” she said. “Before drawing people, I took photographs of people. I was the family photographer,” she said. She also had decades of experience portraying different characters, imbuing them with real emotions and feelings and desires, as an actor.
An installation view of Kate Capshaw’s “Unaccompanied” at the Henry Street Settlement. Courtesy of the artist.
That aptitude for empathy helped her in 2016, when she painted a series of eight portraits of unhoused youth for the Hope Center in Downtown Los Angeles. “Los Angeles had over 50,000 homeless youth kind of hiding in the cracks, and there weren’t real services or real attention on them,” Capshaw said. “So I said, I’ll paint them.” She’s since completed about 20 of these large-scale portraits for the series “Unaccompanied,” and her pictures of homeless youth have been exhibited at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in DC, the Bo Bartlett Gallery at Columbus State University, and the Henry Street Settlement in New York City.
“It is really vulnerable to sit in front of someone while they paint your portrait,” Capshaw said. “But I like people, and so I think people feel that I like them and I’m interested.” In the case of the unhoused kids, “I yielded to them, so if I walked away with some scribbles on a canvas, that would have been fine. My purpose was to sit with them. And most of them did not want to leave. I always asked them if I needed them to come back just to check for color or skin tones, things like that, and they all said yes. One cried when I said that this was our last little sit. So without a lot of words and conversation, it’s a very rich experience.”
Grant did not know that Capshaw was a former film actress or that she was married to a famous director when he initially sat with her. “It went over my head,” the barber said over the phone in between appointments in Miami. “We were having such a good time. We were just connecting on a very organic and very cool level of just people being people.”
Kate Capshaw, Kevin (2020) and Amanda (2021). Courtesy of the artist.
Capshaw usually paints her sitters against a black backdrop, but for Sir.J she chose a brilliant green cloth she found at a barbershop during the Venice Biennale in the spring. They immediately began talking about green (the color of Grant’s first car), Grant’s Nigerian wife, and Capshaw’s mother, who was also a hairdresser. (Capshaw still has her original pair of shears.) Capshaw left their session with a study, as well as some photographs, and then spend the next four months on another, bigger, canvas in her studio.
“Exclusive Tonsorial Services” features Grant’s portrait alongside a series of photo booth images called “In His Hands.” In these shots, local kids show off their free fresh back-to-school haircuts, provided by Grant. “I wanted to highlight his art,” Capshaw said. “His haircuts are his art.” Capshaw painted the gallery walls purple, mustard, and a cerulean blue and then set up risers and made vinyl seat cushions for people to sit and experience the world of Sir.J.
“I’m just trying to think of one word that would describe it,” Grant said. “Beautiful, legendary, just amazing. I am very, very, very, very grateful to be put on an oil painting. I’m still speechless. You know, for this to happen to me—I’m just a person that just decided to become a barber—so I’m grateful.”
Seeing yourself reflected in art is powerful, Capshaw agreed. “If we’re in a museum and there’s a canvas on a wall with a face, we immediately assign that face importance,” she said. “That’s why I wanted [my portraits] big, and I wanted them to really stand in the room and said: pay attention to me, because I’m here, I’m worth looking at.”