A group of black artists are protesting a painting by white New York City artist Dana Schutz for racial insensitivity.
Several artists stood in front of the painting, currently on display at the 2017 Whitney Biennial on Friday, physically blocking it from view for several hours.
The work, entitled “Open Casket”(2016), is based on a famous photograph from the funeral of Emmett Till—a 14-year-old African American boy who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after being falsely accused of flirting with a white woman.
Schutz’s painting depicts Till’s dead body lying in the open-coffin, his mutilated face and chest turned towards the viewer. The boy’s casket was left open at his mother’s request for everyone to witness the brutality of the racist attack to which he’d been victim.
One of the artists protesting the work, Parker Bright, wore a t-shirt with the slogan “Black Death Spectacle” on the back and “No lynch mob” on the front.
“I wanted to confront people with a living, breathing black body” he told the Guardian.
Citing the appropriation of black suffering by white artists as another example of systemic racial oppression, British-born artist Hannah Black penned an open letter to the museum curators demanding that the painting not only be removed, but “destroyed” and “prevented from entering any market or museum.”
“The subject matter is not Schutz’s,” Black wrote on Facebook. “White free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights. The painting must go.”
The note was signed by other artists of color, including Juliana Huxtable. “Although Schutz’s intention may be to present white shame, this shame is not correctly represented as a painting of a dead Black boy by a white artist—those non-black artists who sincerely wish to highlight the shameful nature of white violence should first of all stop treating black pain as raw material.”
Burn that #DanaSchutz painting of Emmet Till's open casket. White woman profiting off of black murder caused by a white woman #wow pic.twitter.com/7o5XqSmQ14
— barney color scheme (@RAF_i_A) March 16, 2017
Many in the black community echoed the sentiment of these artists.
“At the Whitney, a protest against Dana Schutz’ painting of Emmett Till: ‘She has nothing to say to the Black community about Black trauma’,” one museum-goer tweeted.
“Incredibly insulting for a white woman to make this painting” wrote cheyennejulien on Instagram.
“A white woman painting the death of a Black person that happened because of a white woman like wtf is this bullshit,” an Instagram user commented.
The museum curators have responded that despite the controversial nature of Schutz’s work, the painting would stay up for the duration of the Biennial.
“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.
For many African Americans in particular, this image has tremendous emotional resonance. By exhibiting the painting we wanted to acknowledge the importance of this extremely consequential and solemn image in American and African American history and the history of race relations in this country. As curators of this exhibition we believe in providing a museum platform for artists to explore these critical issues.”
Schutz herself responded to the barrage of criticism by saying that although she did not know what it felt like to be a black woman in America, she sympathized with Till’s mother’s pain.
“It is easy for artists to self-censor, to convince yourself to not make something before you even try. There were many reasons why I could not, should not, make this painting … art can be a space for empathy, a vehicle for connection,” she wrote in a statement to the Guardian.
She also swore that the painting would not be made available for sale.
This is not the first time the Whitney Biennial has courted accusations of racial insensitivity and lack of representation.
In 2014, YAMS—a collective of mostly black and queer musicians, poets, actors, writers and artists from Seattle—withdrew their participation from the Biennale to protest the inclusion of fellow artist Joe Scanlon.
Scanlon, a white professor and director of the visual arts program at Princeton’s Lewis Center for the Arts, faced blackface accusations. They stemmed from his creating art under the fake identity of Donelle Woolford—a fictional African American female artist who ended up being listed in his place at the prestigious exhibition.
The stunt, which some called “minstrelsy” and even “conceptual rape” provoked fierce debate about the role of race in the art world.
