Appropriating Emmett Till (updated)

The death of Emmett Till is considered an iconic moment of the civil rights era. The 14-year-old from Chicago was kidnapped and killed in Mississippi where he was visiting family. His alleged crime? He spoke to and was said to have whistled at a married white woman. (She has since recanted her own description of the event.)

Two half-brothers were charged but acquitted by an all-white jury, and Till’s body was transported back to Chicago for his funeral. Photos of the open casket showing Till’s mutilated face were published in Jet and the Chicago Defender — two African-American publications.

Those photos, as The New York Times points out, “served as a catalyst for the civil rights movement and have remained an open wound in American society.” This is where the artist Dana Schutz comes in. She used the photos as inspiration for a painting that is now on display at the Whitney Museum, a painting that has been the subject of protests questioning her motives and the ultimate impact of the painting.

As the Times reports,

An African-American artist, Parker Bright, has conducted peaceful protests in front of the painting since Friday, positioning himself, sometimes with a few other protesters, in front of the work to partly block its view. He has engaged museum visitors in discussions about the painting while wearing a T-shirt with the words “Black Death Spectacle” on the back. Another protester, Hannah Black, a British-born black artist and writer working in Berlin, has written a letter to the biennial’s curators, Mia Locks and Christopher Y. Lew, urging that the painting be not only removed from the show but also destroyed.

This seems extreme, but it does raise legitimate questions, which I attempted to raise in what ended up being a 15-tweet Twitter essay.

Black has gone so far as to question whether a white artist should be able to use Till as subject matter — “The subject matter is not Schutz’s,” he wrote on Facebook, the Times reports.

“White free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights. The painting must go.” She added that “contemporary art is a fundamentally white supremacist institution despite all our nice friends.”

Others have weighed in, deriding the painting as disrespectful, as appropriation, etc. I’m sympathetic — I’ve written in the past (see Facebook debate below), when Kenneth Goldsmith turned Michael Brown’s autopsy into a bad performance piece (edited),  that white artists and writers have to be careful when working with these kinds of images and sensitive to “the meanings created by a privileged white poet/performer dwelling on the details of the body of a dead black teen.”

This debate, however, seems to go farther than the Goldsmith one —  Goldsmith was using found text, while Schutz uses the photo as the basis on which to create her own painted image. We should ask if the painting is good. We should ask what the impact of the painting is on the audience. And we should ask how the artist has handled the subject matter — is it theft or appropriation? Is it a painting that adds to our understanding, creates new ways of seeing the history it is meant to present?

My concern, as a poet and journalist, is that the tenor of this debate has moved beyond this to questions of whether a white artist has the right to focus on black subject matter. I’ll leave this introduction here and invite you to read the Twitter essay that follows, encouraging commentary, response, and advice for this white Jewish artist who is working on a long poem about race and American history. Have at it, my friends.

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Here is Hannah Black’s tumblr letter/petition.

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A Facebook string tied to the current debate:

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Here is the earlier Facebook  debate I mentioned.

Send me an e-mail.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.
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Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

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