Eponymous Black is a stout, surly fellow with bad breath and a death drive that rivals Ophelia. His only friends are the pigeons in Central Park, and even they have their reservations, as often he’s deliberately stingy with the dissemination of the most coveted heels of sourdough bread. He regularly descends into madness, especially after eating figs, and this fact constitutes one of the unknowable mysteries of the universe. Eponymous Black disdains sun worshippers, those buffoonish, asinine people who purchase lawn chairs at the 99cent store, then set up a barbeque on the beach where they slather on sun tan lotion which promptly dissolves, gooey and salt laden, as for hours, they volley deflated balls over a makeshift net.

The entirety of the world derives from Black, just as everything must come from something and light is substantiated by the darkness, yet because he is an ego maniac, this fact is not enough to satisfy dear Eponymous, whose social negotiations include binge watching Orson Well’s entire filmography and picking radishes with an elderly woman from his mother’s retirement home. Eponymous Black is renowned for his collection of rare dung beetles, which he proudly displays on the mantle and sometimes shows off to his landlord, a petite and unassuming woman named Janine, who in her youth, had been a stand-in for the part of Mary Magdalene in Jesus Christ Superstar.

Eponymous Black works as a pharmacist’s assistant, trying to collect enough amphetamines to put himself out and over for good. No one ever suspects him of stealing as each month he manually adjusts Mrs. Adamson’s prescription to account for the missing pills. It’s an ingenious solution to the age-old problem of human malaise. It’s not that Eponymous Black wishes so much to die as he longs to be recognized, or as his esteemed father once put it, “if ya can’t get your name into the papers for doing something good, then, by God, do the worst thing you can think of. . . “and, well, so he did.

  • Lorna Simpson, The Waterbearer, 1986

  • Peter Heyer, Hello?, 2019

  • Mark Rothko, Untitled (Black on Grey), 1970

  • Kara Walker, The Keys to the Coop, 1997

  • Lavialle Campbell, Tassled-Obsidian, 2000

  • Kerry James Marshall, A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self, 1980

  • Aria Dean, Work (tout son col secouera cette blanche agonie), 2021

  • Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #16, 1979

  • Robert Nava, Haunted Wolf House, 2019

  • Robert Motherwell, Elegy Study, 1949