It was one of the works included at the 2017 Whitney Biennial exhibition in New York curated by Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks.

[2] Dana Schutz made the painting in August 2016 in response to media coverage of gun violence, in particular, black men being shot by police.

[3] The portrait is based, in part, on a photograph of Till's mutilated body—his mother had insisted his casket remain open at his funeral to raise awareness of the graphic realities of racism in the U.S.—which was published in The Chicago Defender and Jet magazine.

Although there are no recognizable features, a deep trough carved into the heavy impasto conveys a sense of savage disfigurement, which is heightened by the whiteness of the boy's smoothly ironed dress shirt.

As you know, this painting depicts the dead body of 14-year-old Emmett Till in the open casket that his mother chose, saying, 'Let the people see what I've seen.'

That even the disfigured corpse of a child was not sufficient to move the white gaze from its habitual cold calculation is evident daily and in a myriad of ways, not least the fact that this painting exists at all.

In making the painting, I relied more on listening to Mamie Till's verbal account of seeing her son, which oscillates between memory and observation.

She added that the inclusion of the painting in the Whitney show was a way of "not letting Till's death be forgotten, as Mamie, his mother so wanted.

"[3] Lisa Whittington, a black woman who has also painted pictures on Emmett Till told NBC News "Art takes courage.

But naiveté edges into something much more sinister here, as the work collapses the destruction of Till's body and face, his murder, with the artist's own aesthetic.

')"[7] An open letter purportedly from artist Dana Schutz declaring her desire to remove the painting from exhibition was subsequently proven to be a hoax,[10] and The New Yorker reported that "the museum has been fully supportive of the curators and the artist, and the painting will remain on view throughout the exhibit"[11] and that "the calls to destroy the art were clearly rhetorical, and the protest inside the museum petered out a day or two after the show opened.

"[2] In April 2017, the Whitney Museum partnered with Claudia Rankine and the Racial Imaginary Institute to host "Perspectives on Race and Representation," to address the debate sparked by the painting.