Brandon Taylor on the Quandary of Black Art

In graduate school, I had a professor, a respected contrarian within his field, who was fond of posing the “Negro sunset” problem. It derived, as far as I can recall, from a well-known essay by Langston Hughes called “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” published in 1926. In it, Hughes expresses shame “for the colored artist who runs from the painting of Negro faces to the painting of sunsets.” A Black artist who didn’t find things worthy of aestheticizing within his own culture was, in Hughes’s mind, running from his people. Hughes was mounting an argument for his own time, but the underlying assumptions regarding the aspirations and true content of “Negro art” continue to gnaw on our own.