Correction: Whitney Biennial-Emmett Till Protest story
A painting of lynching victim Emmett Till on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York was the subject of a weeklong protest by a black artist who decried the canvas as "an injustice" because it was painted by a white woman
NEW YORK (AP) — An abstract painting of lynching victim Emmett Till on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York was the subject of a protest by a black artist who decried the canvas as "an injustice to the black community" because it was painted by a white woman.
Parker Bright spent March 17 and 18 standing in front of the painting by Dana Schutz, who used historic photographs as inspiration for her depiction of Till, a 14-year-old black Chicago boy killed by white men in Mississippi in 1955.
[...] s mother insisted on an open-casket funeral to show the world the mutilated body of her son, and Jet magazine published photos of his corpse.
"There were constant mass shootings, racist rallies filled with hate speech, and an escalating number of camera-phone videos of innocent black men being shot by police," she said.
"No one should be making money off a black dead body," he said, demanding that the curators remove the painting from the biennial exhibition.
A Berlin-based British artist, Hannah Black, sent the biennial curators a letter lambasting Schutz for using "black pain as raw material."