Dana Schultz, Open Casket

Dana Schutz, Open Casket, oil on canvas, 2016 

Dana Schutz’s Open Casket was intended as an act of mourning, but it quickly became one of the most divisive artworks of the decade. First shown at Schutz’s solo exhibition in Berlin in 2016, and later included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial in New York, the painting depicts an abstracted view of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Black boy brutally lynched by white men in Mississippi in 1955. Schutz created the work in response to contemporary racial violence in America, particularly the recurring deaths of Black men at the hands of the police.

The painting is based on the infamous photograph of Till’s mutilated body from his open casket funeral, which his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, insisted be shown in an so that the world could see what racism had done to her son. The image was published widely in magazines and became a catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement. Schutz’s rendition translates that photograph into painterly form: Till’s disfigured face rendered in molten brushwork with impasto, his suit and white shirt barely legible, with crushed flowers floating above him. Schutz has said that the source photograph was too painful to look at and that her painting drew instead from Mamie Till’s verbal testimony, an attempt, she claimed, to translate grief rather than reproduce horror.

When Open Casket appeared at the Whitney Biennial, protests erupted. Critics argued that, as a white artist, Schutz had no right to aestheticise Black suffering. The African American artist Parker Bright staged a silent protest in front of the painting, wearing a shirt reading “Black Death Spectacle.” Others defended Schutz’s work as an empathetic gesture and a means of remembrance. The debate exposed a fracture at the centre of contemporary art: where is the boundary between witness and appropriation, empathy and exploitation?

Schutz’s brushwork is frantic and molten, driven more by feeling than representation. She stated that she painted not Till’s body, but her own horror, yet intention cannot undo the power dynamics that frame the act of representation. The controversy surrounding Open Casket forced the art world to confront how privilege shapes artistic authority, even when motivated by solidarity.

Open Casket remains uncomfortable because it should be. It asks whether art can confront violence without repeating it, and whether empathy can exist without power. The scandal was never only about the image itself, but about the gaze, who gets to look, who must live with being seen, and who has the privilege of telling the story. Schutz’s painting keeps Emmett Till’s memory visible, but also reminds us that remembrance without deep understanding risks becoming another act of possession.