Blank Canvas, Big City

The heavy heat and heightened sense of possibility that define New York City summers create a fitting backdrop for a young painter navigating artistic and existential questions in Minor Black Figures, the latest novel from Brandon Taylor MS’17.

The book centers on Wyeth, a queer Black painter splitting his time between odd jobs in New York City’s art world and the shared studio where he maintains his own artistic practice. Stymied by a creative block, Wyeth moves languidly through highbrow gallery openings, interactions with a crowded cast of studiomates, runs through Central Park, and even a romance with a former priest. All the while, he grapples with what it means to be a Black artist in contemporary America and in the internet age.

“I wanted to write about a painter coming to terms with his own political expression when the very fact of political expression can sometimes feel like a pose or a gesture,” Taylor wrote in a 2025 essay on his Substack, Sweater Weather. But to characterize the book by that description alone would be to subject it to the kind of essentializing its protagonist abhors.

“It’s a book about painting and cinema and the gaze. It’s about COVID. It’s about New York. It’s about the fall of Roe. It’s about protest. It’s about silliness. … It’s a book about all that stuff and also about nothing,” Taylor writes. “To me, it’s a love story.”

Taylor is an award-winning author whose debut novel, Real Life, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He is also a faculty member in New York University’s graduate creative writing program.

Published in the Winter 2026 issue