White artists can use black imagery, says Booker nominee Percival Everett | News

A black American author on this year’s Booker Prize shortlist has defended the “appropriation” of black imagery by white artists.

Percival Everett, whose satirical novel The Trees is a frontrunner for this year’s prize, said the “appropriation of anything if well intended is acceptable in art”. He gave the example of an artwork created by the white artist Dana Schutz, based on the image of the dead Emmett Till, a black teenager killed by white racists in Mississippi in 1955.

The lynching of Till — who had been accused of either whistling or making a comment directed at a white woman — is at the center of Everett’s novel. Cultural appropriation has become a contentious topic in the arts world, criticized with white artists