This derivative piece is called "Open Gasket: or what DS could have painted instead" After about a whole morning of reading up on Emmet Till and also Dana Schutz's background and also about Carolyn Bryant Donham (the woman who accused Emmett Till of whistling and violently accosting her) - I came up with this digital conceptual piece titled "Open Gasket: or what DS could have painted instead". The face of Carolyn Bryant's own child (probably six or seven at time of it being published in white magazines) is digitally collaged into the painting by Dana Schutz - the child's face is appropriated from the photo of Bryant with the murderous husband and two children in their laps (LIFE pictures/Getty Images) at the hearing/courtroom. And the book in the coffin with the body is the book that inspired Bryant, then 72 (and just 10 years ago), to call up Timothy Tyson, after having read his book Blood Done Sign My Name (Tyson is white and teaches Afro American history), and to confess that she had lied. So - it's in my opinion that If Dana Schutz's claim is that she was relating empathy to the death of a child via a mother's perspective, then I think my digital remake of her painting here is more fitting to the white mother experience. If not for Tyson's (and one should read up on this author's amazing critical research in terms of race relations in America and unsolved civil rights murders, etc.) then we would not have known about the 72 yr old Bryant's confession to lying about the facts of Emmet Till's demise and her near confession of guilt. “When Carolyn herself [later] lost one of her sons, she thought about the grief that Mamie must have felt and grieved all the more.” - this in my opinion is where the DS painting lacks the appropriate empathy and critical stance that would put her in the forefront of questioning her own privilege in the racial context we live in.

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