Open Casket

Open Casket is a 2016 painting by Dana Schutz. The subject is Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old boy who was lynched by two white men in Mississippi in 1955. It was one of the works included at the 2017 Whitney Biennial exhibition in New York curated by Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks. The painting caused controversy, with protests and calls for the painting's destruction. These may have been merely rhetorical. Protests inside the museum lasted up to two days. 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: