Open Casket

Background and concept

Dana Schutz made the painting in August 2016 in response to media coverage of gun violence, in particular, black men being shot by police. The portrait is based, in part, on a photograph of Till's mutilated body—his mother had insisted his casket remain open at his funeral to raise awareness of the graphic realities of racism in the U.S.—which was published in The Chicago Defender and Jet magazine. "The photograph of Emmett Till felt analogous to the time: what was hidden was now revealed", Schutz told Artnet.

The painting was first exhibited in Schutz's fall 2016 solo exhibition, "Waiting for the Barbarians", at Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin. In February 2017, Open Casket was one of three of Schutz's paintings selected for inclusion in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Describing the painting in a profile on Schutz for The New Yorker, critic Calvin Tomkins wrote, "Measuring thirty-nine by fifty-three inches, it is smaller than most of her recent paintings, and more abstract. The buildup of paint on the face is a couple of inches thick in the area where Till's mouth would be. Although there are no recognizable features, a deep trough carved into the heavy impasto conveys a sense of savage disfigurement, which is heightened by the whiteness of the boy's smoothly ironed dress shirt. His head rests on an ochre-yellow fabric, and deftly brushed colors at the top suggest banked flowers."

Response

Soon after the opening of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, African-American artist Parker Bright began to silently protest Open Casket by standing in front of the painting wearing a T-shirt with "Black Death Spectacle" on the back. Artist and writer Hannah Black posted an open letter to the museum's curators and staff to Facebook calling for the painting's removal and recommending its destruction:

I am writing to ask you to remove Dana Schutz's painting Open Casket 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 ...

These actions led to a conversation in the media on cultural appropriation by white artists.

Schutz responded through comments to reporters about how and why the painting was made:

I don't know what it is like to be black in America but I do know what it is like to be a mother. Emmett was Mamie Till's only son. The thought of anything happening to your child is beyond comprehension. Their pain is your pain. My engagement with this image was through empathy with his mother. ... Art can be a space for empathy, a vehicle for connection. I don't believe that people can ever really know what it is like to be someone else (I will never know the fear that black parents may have) but neither are we all completely unknowable.

On the relationship between her painting and the photograph of Till, Schutz reportedly said, "The photograph of him in his casket is almost impossible to look at. In making the painting, I relied more on listening to Mamie Till's verbal account of seeing her son, which oscillates between memory and observation." Schutz has also commented "The painting is very different from the photograph. I could never render the photograph ethically or emotionally."