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To Dana Schutz Regarding Your Painting, Open Casket
Melinda L. de Jesús
Melinda L. de Jesús
I tried to like it
tried to appreciate its form and composition
But I kept getting stuck:
What do you want us to see?
Why?
Why?
What I see is
black death spectacle
black suffering
your need for absolution
your need to paint this atrocity
you
The impossible irony of a white woman
painting a dead black boy’s mutilated body
intimately
purposefully
lovingly
artistically
pathologically
purposefully
lovingly
artistically
pathologically
A homage to the white gaze
the white need
for black bodies falling
bleeding
hanging
dying
hanging
dying
and your desire to
reimagine
expose
reinvent
commoditize them
expose
reinvent
commoditize them
You could have painted Obama or Beyonce
or even Mrs. Till herself
but you came back to this horrible momentthis dead boy’s body
the literal embodiment of
white patriarchy colluding with
white womanhood
protecting it at all costs
It cost Emmet Till his life
It cost his mother her beautiful son
As a white woman and mother, an artist
What is it costing you?
That’s the painting I need to see.
