Dana Schutz

Dana Schutz (born 1976 in Livonia, Michigan) is an American artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Schutz is known for her gestural, figurative paintings that often take on specific subjects or narrative situations as a point of departure.

Schutz was born and grew up in Livonia, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit.

Her mother was an art teacher in a junior high school and an amateur painter, her father a high school counselor.

An only child, Schutz graduated in 1995 from Adlai E. Stevenson High School.

In 1999, while pursuing her BFA at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Schutz then went abroad to attend the Norwich School of Art and Design in Norwich, England.

That same year, she participated in Maine's Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture residency program, and in 2000 completed her BFA upon her return to Cleveland.

In 2002, Schutz received her MFA from Columbia University in New York City.

Schutz first came to attention in 2002 with her debut exhibition Frank from Observation (2002) at LFL gallery (which then became Zach Feuer Gallery).

This show was based on the conceit of Schutz as the last painter, representing the last subject "Frank".

Since then her fictive subjects have ranged from people who can eat themselves, a gravity fanatic, imaginary births and deaths, public/private performers, awkward situations, and mundane objects.

On the occasion Schutz's museum retrospective at the Neuberger Museum, New York Times critic Karen Rosenberg wrote: "Ms. Schutz has become a reliable conjurer of wickedly grotesque creatures and absurd situations, willed into existence by her vigorous and wildly colorful brush strokes."

She concludes, "Again and again Ms. Schutz has challenged herself to come up with a subject that's too awkward, gross, impractical or invisible to paint. But she has yet to find one that stumps her."

In Shoe, 2002, Dana Schutz portrays a single grey shoe above a sticky blue material that resembles gum, seemingly stuck on a bold orange traffic line.

When asked where she comes up with her subject matter, Schutz told Mei Chin of Bomb magazine: "The paintings are not autobiographical [...] I respond to what I think is happening in the world. The hypotheticals in the paintings can act as surrogates or narratives for phenomena that I feel are happening in culture. In the paintings, I think in terms of adjectives and adverbs. Often I will get information from people or things that I see, a phrase, or how one object relates to another. I construct the paintings as I go along."

In an essay for Schutz's catalog, Dana Schutz: Paintings 2002–2005, New York-based curator Katy Siegel addressed Schutz's work as paintings that "speak so vividly of their making," claiming that the paintings are an "allegory for the process of making art."

Siegel goes on to write "by rendering the process of creation as one of drawing on oneself, recycling oneself and making oneself, Schutz creates a model of creation that blurs beginnings and endings, avoiding the dramatic genesis of the modernist blank canvas, as well as the nihilistic cul-de-sac of the appropriated media image."

Held at Zach Feuer Gallery from November 23, 2002, to January 13, 2003, Schutz's exhibition Frank from Observation focuses on Frank: a middle-aged, pink male.

In this exhibition, Frank acts as Schutz's imagination, imparting Schutz's idea of what the last man on Earth might look like, if she were the last observer.

Schutz describes Frank as: "a character that I invented. He was the last man on earth and I was the last audience and his last witness. He would pose for me and I would make other people and events out of him."

One interpretation of Schutz's exhibit is the chance to start anew; no laws, no society, and no one else to hold oneself accountable.

In an interview with Mei Chin from Bomb Magazine, Schutz said her inspiration for this collection came from the question, "What would this person look like if there was only one other person on earth to say what he looked like?"

Schutz continues her explanation with her perception of achieved sanity, "There is this sense that you always need someone else to check reality with."

Jörg Heiser, who has compared Schutz to Austrian painter Maria Lassnig, describes the work in his 2008 book All of a Sudden: "Her canvases are 'too big,' the way showy gold chains are too big, but also skeptical and at times bad-tempered, the way intelligent teenagers are in their loathing of the bland aestheticism and brash sexuality of pop-modernity".

With regard to color, Heiser adds: "Schutz's pictures favor a carefully chosen palette of vomit and mold and rot, between pink and purple, turquoise and olive, ocher and crap."

In 2012 Schutz presented her exhibition Piano in the Rain at Petzel Gallery in New York.

In her review of the show, New York Times critic Roberta Smith praised it, writing: "More than ever, Ms. Schutz seems to want every stroke and smudge of paint to register separately so that you can see through to the bare canvas and reconstruct her every move as she fearlessly tackles life's flux."

Schutz's 2016 painting Open Casket derives from the photograph of the mutilated corpse of Emmett Till, whose mother, Mamie Till Mobley, insisted on an open casket at his 1955 funeral because she wanted her community to see what had happened to her son.

She had said, "I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby."

Photos of Till's open casket funeral were published in The Chicago Defender and Jet magazine; the murder was a seminal event in the civil rights movement.

The artist has stated that she approached the painting from the perspective of a mother and partly based it on the verbal account of Till's mother about seeing her son after his death.

Art.net critic Christian Viveros-Fauné described the work as "a powerful painterly reaction to the infamous [photograph] ... the canvas makes material the deep cuts and lacerations portrayed in the original photo by means of cardboard relief."

Dana Schutz' painting of the corpse of Emmett Till, titled Open Casket, drew protests when shown in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, and there were demands that it be removed from the show.

Some objected to the painting's inclusion in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, there were debates online, and protesters physically blocked the work from view.

Artist and Whitney ISP graduate Hannah Black posted an open letter on Facebook, writing that "it is not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun, though the practice has been normalized for a long time. Although Schutz's intention may be to present white shame, this shame is not correctly represented as a painting of a dead Black boy by a white artist ... The painting must go."

Schutz responded, "I don't know what it is like to be black in America, but I do know what it is like to be a mother. Emmett was Mamie Till's only son. The thought of anything happening to your child is beyond comprehension. [...] It is easy for artists to self-censor. To convince yourself to not make something before you even try. There were many reasons why I could not, should not, make this painting ... (but) art can be a space for empathy, a vehicle for connection."

Jo Livingstone and Lovia Gyarkye of the New Republic argued Open Casket is a form of cultural appropriation disrespectful toward Mobley's intention for the images of her son.

Describing how the painting undermines the photograph they wrote, "Mobley wanted those photographs to bear witness to the racist brutality inflicted on her son; instead Schutz has disrespected that act of dignity, by defacing them with her own creative way of seeing."

Schutz has shown sculptures in 2019 at Petzel Gallery in New York that were first made in clay and then cast in bronze.

Schutz's work was included in the 2022 exhibition Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.