Why I made the list. And why I rarely make them anymore.

In April 2023 I uploaded a video titled “10 Most Influential Living Black Painters.” It runs almost half an hour. I sat in front of a camera and walked through ten artists I admire — their work, their materials, their major shows, the institutions that hold their work in permanent collections. Kerry James Marshall opened the list. Amoako Boafo closed it.

Lorna Simpson, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Rashid Johnson, Amy Sherald, Nick Cave, Mickalene Thomas, Mark Bradford, and Jordan Casteel filled in between.

That video has been watched more times than almost anything else I have made. Two years later it still pulls views every week. It is the most consistent piece of evergreen traffic on the channel.

I rarely make lists anymore.

Both things are true at the same time, and the gap between them is what I want to write about.

Why I made the list.

The honest answer first. I was newer to the platform in 2023. I was building an audience. Lists are how people on YouTube find new channels — “10 most” is the syntax the algorithm rewards because it is the syntax the search demand creates. Someone, somewhere, types “Black painters you should know” into the search bar every day, and the platform's job is to return a result. If you make the result, the platform delivers viewers to your door for free for the next several years.

That is what the list did. It is one of the most efficient pieces of audience-building work I have ever made. Many of the people who eventually became Glory Gang found me through that video and others like it. The Patreon community, the GloryLand audience, the Tuesday Live regulars — a real share of them came in through that door. I do not regret the door.

I also believed, and still believe, that the work of introducing a serious audience to a canon of contemporary Black painters is not minor. There are not enough resources that do that work in a single accessible place. The video was a service. People emailed me to say they bought their first piece of art after watching it. That is real.

So the list earned its place.

Why I rarely make them anymore.

The reasons compound. None of them are about the artists.

First: lists flatten. The form requires you to rank, or at least imply ranking — even when you say you aren't. A list of ten places a tenth artist in a tenth-place position, no matter how clearly you state that order does not matter. The reader's eye reads top to bottom. The algorithm reads top to bottom. The artist who closes the video closes it. There is no way around the math.

Second: lists reproduce the hierarchy I now want to dismantle. When I made the list I was working with a canon the institutions had already canonized. Marshall, Simpson, Yiadom-Boakye, Bradford — these are artists whose work is supported by MoMA, the Met, the Whitney, the Tate. Their inclusion was inarguable. But the inarguability was the problem: I was reinforcing a canon that other people had already written, instead of doing the harder work of asking what gets left out when the canon gets written this way?

Third: lists tell readers “these are the important ones” without naming criteria. Important to whom? Influential how? Measured by acquisitions? Auction results? Instagram followers? Press attention? The depth of the work itself? The criteria for a list like that are usually a mix of all of those, weighted by what the maker happened to have read recently. Two years in, I am much less comfortable doing that work without showing the math.

Fourth: lists extract attention from artists without deepening the conversation about the work. A list invites a viewer to memorize names. A real piece of writing invites them to think. The two are different exercises. The list builds audience because it gives the viewer something to do — recognize the names, share the video, save the screenshot. The deeper piece builds something else: a real reader, who actually thinks about why this work matters.

I want the second reader now. Two years ago I needed the first.

A list invites a viewer to memorize names. A real piece of writing invites them to think.

Why the list was still the right move in 2023.

This is the part I want to say honestly, because I am not interested in dunking on my old work. The 2023 video did three things at once that I could not have done any other way at the time.

It met people where they were searching. The video answered a question that thousands of people were typing into YouTube every month. If I had made a 10,000-word essay on the structural critique of canonical Black painting in May 2023, three people would have read it. I would have written it for myself. The list reached a community that didn't know it was a community yet.

It built the platform that allowed me to make the deeper work. The Glory Edit, the Tuesday Live, the Collective, GloryLand — none of these exist without the audience the early lists pulled in. The form was a vehicle. The vehicle did its job.

It pointed people at the artists. Whatever I think about the format now, ten artists whose work deserves more attention got more attention. People bought books. People visited shows. People followed the artists on Instagram. The work moved.

That is enough to defend the video. It is not enough to defend the format as a steady editorial diet, which is why I stopped.

The artists, named correctly — for the record.

If you watched the video, the names are: Kerry James Marshall, Lorna Simpson, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Rashid Johnson, Amy Sherald, Nick Cave, Mickalene Thomas, Mark Bradford, Jordan Casteel, and Amoako Boafo.

All of those names are correct. I want to say that out loud because I mispronounced more than one of them in the original video and the comments noticed. The 2023 version stays up because it stays useful, and because I do not want to pretend the early work was tighter than it was.

Where I might still make one: as an entry point.

Here is the part I was not ready to say in the public piece when I first started writing it.

A list is justified when it is an entry point. A door for someone who genuinely does not know where to start. When the audience is new to the field, when the question being asked is “who matters and where do I begin?” — a list answers a real question. The person who searches “Black painters you should know” is not asking for the structural critique. They are saying, “I want to know who matters and I trust someone to tell me.”

If I am the someone they trust, the list is not the problem. The list is the door.

The problem is when the list pretends to be the room.

An extractive list is one that uses the format to harvest attention — from the artists, from the audience, from the search algorithm — without doing the work of holding the door open. It treats the format as a destination. It does not point to deeper work. It does not name its criteria. It does not say what gets left out. It does not link onward. It is, in the simplest terms, a list that owes the reader something it does not deliver.

An entry-point list is the opposite. It is honest about being introductory. It names a small set of artists or works at the level of confidence the maker actually has. It tells the reader, in plain terms, that this is a place to start. It is followed by an apparatus that lets the reader graduate — a longer piece, a profile of one of the artists, a follow-up that goes deeper than the form allowed. It treats the artists on it as people who are owed thoughtful introduction, not just a thumbnail.

So I may make another list. If I do, it will be because the audience genuinely needs the door — and I can hold the door open without pretending it is the room.

What I would do differently now.

If I were making this list today I would name the criteria. I would say: I am picking artists working in painting (with some expanded practice) whose work has been acquired by at least three major institutional collections, who have had a solo museum exhibition in the last five years, whose work I have personally seen, and whose presence on this list will not be a surprise to anyone who follows the field. That is the math. Naming it makes the list defensible. Hiding it does not.

I would also say what is being left out: a list of ten painters the audience already trusts the institutions to validate is by definition a list that excludes the artists working at the edge of what the institutions are ready to validate. The artists I am most excited about right now mostly do not have ten museum acquisitions to their name. They have one. Or none. The list format is bad at finding them.

That is the work I am doing instead.

I would not title the piece a list. I would pick three to five artists, not ten, and write about each at the length the work deserves. I would name the people who have not been written about enough. I would interview at least one of them. I would tell the reader where to actually see the work in person, not just where it is held in a permanent collection that has it in storage. I would name a specific show — at a specific museum, on a specific set of dates — and tell the reader to go.

The list was the unlock.

That is the Glory Edit version. The 2023 list was the YouTube version. Different audiences, different formats, different jobs.

I do not regret making the list.

If I make another, it will be because it is a door — not because it is a destination.

The list was the unlock. The work is what is on the other side of the door.