Honor Titus

Honor Titus (born July 18, 1989, in Brooklyn, New York) is an American painter and multidisciplinary artist whose figurative paintings bring literary, cinematic, and art-historical intelligence to scenes of leisure, sport, intimacy, and social ritual. Working with flattened planes of color, economical line, and carefully held intervals of silence, Titus constructs images that feel both immediate and recollected. His paintings consider class, aspiration, solitude, memory, and the cultivated theater of everyday life.

A reader as much as an image maker, Titus approaches painting with the compression and ambiguity of a short story. Literature enters his work not as illustration but as cadence: in the titles, atmosphere, withheld narratives, and emotional distance of his figures. His paintings engage a lineage that includes Fairfield Porter, Edward Hopper, and Alex Katz, alongside Édouard Vuillard and Maurice Denis of Les Nabis, while reframing those traditions through the experience of contemporary Black life.

In his essay “Honor Titus’s Moral Imaginations” (2023), Klaus Ottmann notes that Titus has acknowledged Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, and Félix Vallotton, Edward Hopper, and the stylized portraits of Alex Katz and Kehinde Wiley as influences. In conversation with Henry Taylor (Interview, 2021), he spoke of the inspiration he finds in Andy Warhol. The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, which acquired Portable Prince in 2023, presents it alongside works from its collection that share its themes, including Barkley L. Hendricks’s Bahsir (Robert Gowens).

Selected interviews and criticism

Before focusing on painting, Titus was the lead vocalist of the Brooklyn punk band Cerebral Ballzy and organized poetry readings in New York. After assisting artist Raymond Pettibon, he moved to Los Angeles in 2016 and developed his visual art practice. Painter Henry Taylor became a mentor and presented Titus’s first solo exhibition, Goodness Gracious, in Los Angeles in 2020. Titus lives and works in Los Angeles with his wife, filmmaker Gia Coppola.

His work has been presented internationally by Gagosian, Timothy Taylor, the Queens Museum, the Longlati Foundation, and the National Portrait Gallery, London, and is held in public and private collections.

Selected exhibitions and projects

Recent projects include Louis Malle Practice, installed on the façade of the Queens Museum during the 2025 US Open; Advantage In, Gagosian, Beverly Hills (2023); Ornamental Distance, Longlati Foundation, Shanghai (2023); Bourgeoisie in Bloom, Timothy Taylor, London (2022–23); For Heaven’s Sake, Timothy Taylor, New York (2021); and Goodness Gracious, Henry Taylor Gallery, Los Angeles (2020).

Titus was among the artists commissioned by His Majesty King Charles III for Windrush: Portraits of a Pioneering Generation. His portrait of Delisser Bernard entered the Royal Collection and was exhibited at the Palace of Holyroodhouse and the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Selected collections

Royal Collection Trust, UK
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Dallas Museum of Art
The FLAG Art Foundation, New York
Longlati Foundation, Shanghai
Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
Rennie Collection, Vancouver
Pérez Art Museum Miami

Honor Titus, Los Angeles (2024). Photograph by Gia Coppola.