Brandon Taylor — Minor Black Figures - with Yuri Long

A newcomer to New York, Wyeth is a Black painter who grew up in the South and is trying to find his place in the contemporary Manhattan art scene. It's challenging. Gallery shows displaying bad art. Pretentious artists jockeying for attention. The gossip and the backstabbing. While his part-time work for an art restorer is engaging, Wyeth suffers from artist's block with his painting and he is finding it increasingly difficult to spark his creativity. When he meets Keating, a white former seminarian who left the priesthood, Wyeth begins to reconsider how to observe the world, in the process facing questions about the conflicts between Black and white art, the white gaze on the Black body, and the compromises we make - in art and in life.As he did so adeptly in Booker finalist Real Life and the bestselling The Late Americans, Brandon Taylor brings to life in Minor Black Figures a fascinating set of characters, this time in the competitive art world, and the lives they lead with each and on their own. Minor Black Figures is an involving and tender portrait of friendship, creativity, and the connections between them.Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels The Late Americans and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Science + Literature Selected Title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, was awarded The Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He is the 2022-2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.Taylor is in conversation with Yuri Long, an artist based in Washington, DC, working mainly in photography and printmaking. His work has been shown across the DMV and beyond, including Photoworks at Glen Echo Park, the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, and the National Geographic Museum. His work focuses on themes related to the perception of time, memory, motion and color and how images allow us to navigate them in novel ways. He has self published two photobooks, Apparent Retrograde (2019) and Year of the  Rabbit (2025), through his imprint Antiquated Modern Press. https://www.antiquatedmodern.com/https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593332368?ic_referral=wtcgAwj2K_2l-F5jHTtl17SfiHYhlkLNlVtTX-jhipIwM4I9Ov3LgbYctb3UQvpXspK_iqeup0bN8fAQBMo8p2p_aICcdkVM0aaW3lXBr9V-w4qa5ZRoVLKKxxpSNfkp6gOnXlM