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." 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." 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 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." 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.
Frank From Observation 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." and there were demands that it be removed from the show. 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." 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."
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." Scholar
Christina Sharpe, one of 34 other signatories to Black's letter, argued for the destruction of the painting so that neither the artist nor future owners of the painting could profit off it. Schutz's work reportedly goes for up to $482,500 at
auction, responded by writing: "I find it alarming and entirely wrongheaded to call for the censorship and destruction of an artwork, no matter what its content is or who made it." She contextualized the painting within a history of anti-racist art made by white artists dating back to the 19th-century
abolitionist movement. In weighing in on the discussion,
Roberta Smith cited examples of "earlier works of art by those who crossed ethnic lines in their depiction of social trauma." == Exhibitions ==