In the fall of 2009, Titus Kaphar recalls pacing the floor of his Los Angeles gallery anxiously awaiting Venus Williams’s arrival. It was his first solo exhibition in the city, and the team at Roberts & Tilton (now Roberts Projects) told him that the tennis star had recently spotted one of his paintings. “I kept thinking, She might come in today, she might come in tomorrow,” he recalls.

In addition to being a seven-time Grand Slam champion and film producer, Williams has collected art—sans advisor—since she was in her late 20s, championing artists like Simone Leigh and Adam Pendleton, and even guiding her sister Serena on her own acquisitions. Over the last two decades, she’s also channeled her creative energies into a design practice, V Starr, and penned two books. Her second, Strive: 8 Steps to Find Your Awesome, takes her exceptional career as a blueprint for optimizing her readers’ lives.

Since Kaphar broke onto the scene in the late aughts, the artist has gone on to win a MacArthur “genius” grant, co-found the New Haven nonprofit NXTHVN, and gain international acclaim for paintings that reimagine the representation and erasure of Black figures in history. He began testing the waters of filmmaking in 2016 with a number of shorts and released his first feature-length film, Exhibiting Forgiveness, this year. Its exploration of a father-son relationship is not unlike 2021’s Oscar-winning King Richard, produced by the Williams sisters and highlighting their father’s contributions to their record-breaking careers.

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