Black Artists Are Calling For An Emmett Till Painting To Be Destroyed
The painting “Open Casket” was created by a white artist.
"Open Casket," a new painting by white New York artist Dana Schutz, is being protested by black artists for a perceived exploitation of a still-traumatic incident in American history. The work is currently shown at the Whitney Biennial.
The painting is an interpretation of press images depicting the body of Emmett Till, a fourteen year old African American boy who in 1955 was tortured and killed in Mississippi by two white men after a woman claimed he had whistled and grabbed at her (the woman, Carolyn Donham, later admitted to providing false testimony). Emmett's mother insisted on an open casket funeral to display the damage her son's body had endured. The resulting photos of his destroyed face are credited for catalyzing the civil rights movement.
Artnet has reported that the painting was blocked last Friday by a small group who concealed the painting from view until the museum closed. The Berlin-based artist Hannah Black has also written an open letter to the Biennial, which you can read in full below. She is asking that "the painting be destroyed and not entered into any market or museum."
To the curators and staff of the Whitney biennial:
I am writing to ask you to remove Dana Schutz’s painting “Open Casket” and with the urgent recommendation that the painting be destroyed and not entered into any market or museum.
As you know, this painting depicts the dead body of 14-year-old Emmett Till in the open casket that his mother chose, saying, “Let the people see what I’ve seen.” That even the disfigured corpse of a child was not sufficient to move the white gaze from its habitual cold calculation is evident daily and in a myriad of ways, not least the fact that this painting exists at all. In brief: the painting should not be acceptable to anyone who cares or pretends to care about Black people because 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.
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. The subject matter is not Schutz’s; white free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights. The painting must go.
Emmett Till’s name has circulated widely since his death. It has come to stand not only for Till himself but also for the mournability (to each other, if not to everyone) of people marked as disposable, for the weight so often given to a white woman’s word above a Black child’s comfort or survival, and for the injustice of anti-Black legal systems. Through his mother’s courage, Till was made available to Black people as an inspiration and warning. Non-Black people must accept that they will never embody and cannot understand this gesture: the evidence of their collective lack of understanding is that Black people go on dying at the hands of white supremacists, that Black communities go on living in desperate poverty not far from the museum where this valuable painting hangs, that Black children are still denied childhood. Even if Schutz has not been gifted with any real sensitivity to history, if Black people are telling her that the painting has caused unnecessary hurt, she and you must accept the truth of this. The painting must go.
Ongoing debates on the appropriation of Black culture by non-Black artists have highlighted the relation of these appropriations to the systematic oppression of Black communities in the US and worldwide, and, in a wider historical view, to the capitalist appropriation of the lives and bodies of Black people with which our present era began. Meanwhile, a similarly high-stakes conversation has been going on about the willingness of a largely non-Black media to share images and footage of Black people in torment and distress or even at the moment of death, evoking deeply shameful white American traditions such as the public lynching. Although derided by many white and white-affiliated critics as trivial and naive, discussions of appropriation and representation go to the heart of the question of how we might seek to live in a reparative mode, with humility, clarity, humour and hope, given the barbaric realities of racial and gendered violence on which our lives are founded. I see no more important foundational consideration for art than this question, which otherwise dissolves into empty formalism or irony, into a pastime or a therapy.
The curators of the Whitney biennial surely agree, because they have staged a show in which Black life and anti-Black violence feature as themes, and been approvingly reviewed in major publications for doing so. Although it is possible that this inclusion means no more than that blackness is hot right now, driven into non-Black consciousness by prominent Black uprisings and struggles across the US and elsewhere, I choose to assume as much capacity for insight and sincerity in the biennial curators as I do in myself. Which is to say – we all make terrible mistakes sometimes, but through effort the more important thing could be how we move to make amends for them and what we learn in the process. The painting must go.
Thank you for reading
Hannah Black
Artist/writer
Whitney ISP 2013-14
Co-signatories/with the support of:
Amal Alhaag
Hannah Assebe
Anwar Batte
Charmaine Bee
Parker Bright
Vivian Crockett
Jareh Das
Aria Dean
Chrissy Etienne
Hamishi Farah
Ja'Tovia Gary
Juliana Huxtable
Anisa Jackson
Hannah Catherine Jones
Devin Kenny
Carolyn Lazard
Taylor LeMelle
Tiona Nekkia McClodden
Sandra Mujinga
Precious Okoyomon
Emmanuel Olunkwa
Imani Robinson
Andrew Ross
Christina Sharpe
Misu Simbiatu
Dominique White
Kandis Williams
Black's letter was originally shared on Facebook with a number of non-black signatures. However, it was later edited to remove these names. “In response to some helpful criticism, I’m now only including Black co-signs," Black wrote at the beginning of the post. "Non-Black people super very welcome to help get painting destroyed tho in other ways.”
She continued: "Remember, contemporary art is a fundamentally white supremacist institution despite all our nice friends, so most of what happens in it is politically meaningless. But the painting should still be destroyed, tho."
On Tuesday, the Whitney Biennial curators, Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks, responded to the letter and protest in a statement to artnet News:
“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. Dana Schutz’s painting, Open Casket (2016), is an unsettling image that speaks to the long-standing violence that has been inflicted upon African Americans. 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.”