Dr John Blakinger speaks about the controversy surrounding Dana Shutz's painting of the body of Emmett Till exhibited at the 2017 Whitney Biennnial.
Terra Foundation Lectures in American Art 2019 - A Contest of Images: American Art as Culture War (2) The Body of Emmett Till
Who has the right to see in an age of image overload? At the 2017 Whitney Biennial, a painting by the artist Dana Schutz depicting the body of Emmett Till, a fifteen-year-old African-American boy lynched in Mississippi in 1955, incited outrage. The artists Hannah Black and Parker Bright condemned the work as "black death spectacle." The episode resuscitated debates over the use and abuse of traumatic pictures, and the way visual images propelling the Civil Rights movement also exploited their subjects.
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A series of lectures delivered by Terra Visiting Professors of American Art, as part of their year at University of Oxford’s History of Art Department. Find out more about other History of Art events, lectures and courses on the History of Art Department homepage https://www.hoa.ox.ac.uk/