Brandon Taylor on Black Art: 'Do I Ever Get to Just Be a Painter?'

Booker Prize finalist Brandon Taylor returned to The Center for Fiction's stage to launch his new novel Minor Black Figures, and used the conversation to argue that discourse around Black art in America rests on a racist, essentialist logic — even when it sounds progressive.

Taylor, author of Real Life and Filthy Animals, appeared with Matthew Sitman, host of the Know Your Enemy podcast. The novel follows Wyeth, a young Black painter in the New York art scene, caught between creative struggle and the fraught perception of the Black body in art.

What does Taylor actually claim?

Sitman read a line from the novel in which Wyeth tells Chloe that "every Black painter had two careers, a career among their Black contemporaries and a career among their white contemporaries. As much as he hated that logic, after all, some Black painters weren't famous because they were bad painters. But it did have, at bottom, a sense of truth."

Taylor confirmed he believes this applies to his own work as a writer. "There is how your work is conceived, received and conceptualized and contextualized among your Black peers when you're a Black writer, a Black artist, or a Black anything," he said.

He framed the problem as two parallel conversations. "There's like the Black contemporary, and then there's the contemporary," Taylor said. "And somehow, the Black contemporary is never allowed to signify that outer, larger conversation." He attributed this to historical and social reasons that have "largely to do with racism."

The choice of a painter rather than a writer as protagonist was deliberate. Taylor said it gave him distance from conversations about his own work and that of his peers, letting him observe how discourses around Black art function in other media. His finding: "no matter what the medium is, almost regardless of what the art itself is, the conversation is the same. The dynamics are the same."

He was blunt about the implication. "I could paint a red circle, a blue square, or an octopus, and people would say the exact same things about the work, like the work is immaterial to the discourse in a way. And that to me feels really stupid and kind of evil."

The viral Bergman scene

The novel's sharpest plot turn draws on the summer of 2020. Wyeth's method is simple: he takes scenes from European cinema and inserts Black figures into them, with no political project beyond that. In art school, his Black classmates objected — "our people are dying. Please stop doing your European fanfiction" — while his white classmates questioned why Black people belonged in pristine European scenes.

During the BLM protests, Wyeth paints a Bergman scene with Black people in it and uploads it. Instagram reads it as commentary on the precariousness of Black life. He goes mega-viral. Someone offers him a pile of money. Wyeth says "this is just Bergman," and the buyer replies: "I know. That's why it's so beautiful."

Taylor said he was "cackling" as he wrote it. The scene traps Wyeth in a double bind: if his lack of a political project is exposed, he fears being called a fraud; refusing the projection reads as distancing himself from other Black artists.

"Am I allowed to have my own aesthetic reasons as a Black artist in America, or am I always part of a larger cultural conversation? Do I ever get to just be a painter?" Taylor asked. He offered no resolution. "I have no answer and neither does he. I mean, do we ever get to just be anything really?"

Taylor's credentials anchor the claim: Real Life was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Filthy Animals won The Story Prize, and he served as the 2022–2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Minor Black Figures now tests whether readers of a novel about painting will let its author have his aesthetic reasons.