Minor Black Figures is an interesting blend of politics, art, and LGBTQI issues. Wyeth, a young Black artist, was raised by a distant White mother and absent Black father. He worries constantly about how people perceive him and his art. He’s having trouble painting and can’t break out of that inability to produce. He’s working two part-time jobs as an art restorer and in a gallery to make ends meet during a NYC summer while sharing a studio with several other artists. He meets a young White man, Keating, a former Jesuit priest, and they have a rather sweet love affair during which Wyeth slowly opens up.
This is not a rapid-fire book, but a slowly developing story that is well worth pursuing. There is a lot of art criticism where, which I found somewhat boring, but I was fascinated by the look at the Black gaze versus the White gaze, and how “the black gaze had been shaped and colonized and turned against itself, splintered and doubled, so that every black field of view held within it some secret, invisible second dimension.” And “[t]hat was one of the more insidious aspects of racism, and white supremacy broadly, the way it could give you a tiny white man in your mind to argue with constantly all the way up and down until you died never having had a single thought that was not either about whiteness or a reaction to whiteness, and that it could make even the undulations of your own subjectivity something to suspect and interrogate.” I really found these ideas interesting and have continued to think about them long after finishing the book.
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Minor Black Figures(Riverhead Books, October 14, 2025) is available through:
Your local independent bookseller | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
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