Bentley Brown

You have to be a fox to survive in the art world as a black man.

Have to be.

Everybody looks at the fox as like a nefarious sort of character, right?

But my dad kind of looked at it as like, nah, that's just a cat who has to do whatever it has to do to survive.

Because he'd always talk about how bright orange the ingots were.

You can see the bright orange in there.

Yeah.

So then after that, he signed with Marlboro Gallery.

And so that was a big deal because Marlboro Gallery was the hottest gallery at that time.

We talk about Basquiat being the first Black artist to sort of make that break.

It was really my dad, like, I'm not even going to hold you.

I'm not going to sugarcoat it, you know?

My dad kept trying to get, like, a retrospective, and he couldn't get a retrospective anywhere.

And they decided to do it in the National Museum of China, which, like, is on Tiananmen Square.

And it's, like, an insanely huge building.

And he had a lot, I mean, he had 60,000 people a day for, like, 30 days.

He had to go to China...

He had to go to China to be seen as an American artist.

Instead... Marlboro was pissed that he did the show because they did it without their consent.

He took out a loan to do it himself of half a million dollars.