Friday, March 29, 2024

White Artist’s Painting of Emmett Till in Open Casket Sparks Racial Debate, Protests

Open Casket - Dana Schultz
Open Casket – Dana Schultz

*An abstract painting of Emmett Till currently featured in New York’s Whitney Museum of Art reimagines the searing image of the murdered teen disfigured and unidentifiable following his brutal murder on August 28, 1955.

The painting, titled “Open Casket,” has become the source of backlash because the artist, Dana Schultz, is white. According to NBC, her work has “sparked conversation on cultural appropriation, artistic ownership and black bodies as a spectacle, culminating in a critical question: Do white artists have the right to depict black pain?”

This week a number of black artists have called for its removal and have physically blocked the piece in the gallery space.

This past Saturday, the artist Parker Bright held a protest in front of the work while sporting a grey T-shirt, with “BLACK DEATH SPECTACLE” written in Sharpie on the back of it. He reportedly said, “She has nothing to say to the black community about black trauma.”

Berlin-based artist Hannah Black posted an open letter on Facebook to the Whitney Museum curators and staff on Tuesday. “It is not acceptable for a white person to transmute black suffering into profit and fun, though the practice has been normalized for a long time,” Black wrote. “Contemporary art is a fundamentally white supremacist institution.”

Schutz defends her painting, saying it is “not a rendering of the photograph but is more an engagement with the loss.” She also says the painting “was never and is not for sale.”

“I understand the outrage. Till’s photograph was a sacred image of the Civil Rights movement and I am a white woman. I did not take making this painting lightly,” Schutz said in a statement to NBCBLK. “I don’t object to people questioning the work or even my right to make it. There has to be an open discussion.”

Despite public outcry from Black artists, the Whitney Biennial curators are standing by their decision to feature the work.

Nancy and Fred Poses curators Mia Locks and Christopher Y. Lew released a joint statement to NBCBLK stating, “The 2017 Whitney Biennial brings to light many facets of the human experience, including conditions that are painful or difficult to confront such as violence, racism, and death. Many artists in the exhibition push in on these issues, seeking empathetic connections in an especially divisive time.”

The curators describe Schutz’s painting as an “unsettling image that speaks to the long-standing violence that has been inflicted upon African Americans.”

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