preview

Dana Schutz

Decent Essays

abstract, painted with energetic brush strokes, it has some kind of silence to it. Dana Schutz did not use her usual tropical color palette to paint this painting. The artist used yellow, brown and white tones mixed with black and red. Image is showing Emmett’s head and a torso quite zoomed in. However, the angle is different from a photograph, in a painting Emmett is positioned horizontal to a viewer. Emmett is wearing a black tuxedo with a white shirt. The tuxedo is painted carefully, with clean lines and with a red rose positioned on tuxedo pants, which I found quite surprising, because usually flowers are placed on lapels of tuxedos. Emmett’s face is destructed, there is a visible deep cut in the paint. A lot of paint was used to paint …show more content…

Right when the exhibition opened, it was not greeted well, especially by African - American artists. One of them, Parker Bright, stood in front of Open Casket, blocking it, but not that you could totally not see, with his back facing the viewer. On a back on his T-shirt was written “Black Death Spectacle”. Same afternoon, there was an open letter released on Facebook directed to exhibition curators Mia Locks and Christopher Y. Lew, by a british artist and a writer Hannah Black. In a letter Hannah Black demanded the picture taken down and even destroyed: “It is not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun’. It was signed by 25 black artists. They felt that it is unfair for a white woman to exploit black history, because it is not her history and she never lived it. There was even a letter released by Dana Schutz, asking Whitney museum to take down the painting, which was later confirmed to be fake. In my opinion, these actions are too extreme and limiting the freedom of speech. I think, regardless of the color of the skin, this kind of act of violence towards a teenager brings out strong emotions in a lot of people. Expressing thoughts and feelings should not be

Get Access