“Let the world see what I have seen,” said Mamie Till Mobley, whose profound words helped spark the civil rights movement in 1955 when she left her 14-year-old black son’s casket open at his funeral after he was lynched for allegedly whistling at a white woman. Now, Brooklyn painter Dana Schutz has painted Emmett Till’s mangled face and put it on view at the Whitney Biennial.

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Black artist Parker Bright staged a protest in front of Schutz’s painting while wearing a shirt that read “Black Death Spectacle”, while black British artist Hannah Black wrote a public letter to the curators, calling for the artwork to not only be removed from the exhibition, but to also be destroyed.

Last night, the biennial curators Christopher Y Lew and Mia Locks organized a public discussion titled Perspectives on Race and Representation: An Evening with the Racial Imaginary Institute, hosted by award-winning poet and playwright Claudia Rankine. Since Rankine received a $625,000 stipend for a MacArthur genius grant last year, she founded the Racial Imaginary Institute, a Manhattan-based organization (and this fall, it will open as an art gallery) that aims to curate dialogues around white supremacy in American society. As she writes on the institute’s website: “Given the concept of racial hierarchy is a strategy employed to support white dominance, whiteness is an important aspect of any conversation about race.”

Rankine remains concerned about the media debate around the painting. “As people, we’re so excited by controversy,” she said on the phone earlier last week. “The Dana Schutz painting created a discussion much larger than her or her painting; it pointed out a kind of vacuum in the culture, thinking and talking about black pain and black suffering. I think that’s where this discussion should reside.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dana Schutz’s Open Casket at the Whitney Biennial. Photograph: Alina Heineke/AP

Schutz said she made the painting, titled Open Casket, after seeing hate speech in the summer leading up to the US presidential election. “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,” Schutz writes in a statement. Since Emmett was Mamie Till Mobley’s only son, her choice to leave his wounded face in an open casket for everyone to see was “not just to be her pain, but America’s pain”.

Rankine’s focus also extends to several artworks in the Whitney Biennial – a show she calls “probably the most democratized curatorial achievement I’ve seen in a while” – and suffering remains a key component.

“Until we are willing to look at the ways in which white Americans are culpable in the suffering of the people of color, and understand that culpability needs to be present in the representation of that, suffering will continue,” she adds, “until we get to that point, we will continue to get caught up in the scandal moments.”

This isn’t the first time the biennial has had problems with race, there were protests in the 1960s and 1970s about the lack of black and female artists, many led by Harlem artist Faith Ringgold. At the time, less than 1% of non-white artists were showing at the museum and the protests led to the first black women artists showing in their now-defunct Sculpture Biennial in 1970. In 1972, the first African American woman had a solo art exhibition at the Whitney, Alma Thomas, but Ringgold has yet to show at the Whitney.

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Michele Wallace, Ringgold’s daughter, is an English professor at the City of University of New York. She said some things haven’t changed since she picketed the front lines with her mother. “I was only 16 when I took part in the first demo at the Whitney,” she said. “Things haven’t changed nearly enough in terms of the issues of exclusion and white solipsism we were addressing.”

The problem might be at the top of the art world food chain. “There’s only so much subversion that can occur in the art world as presently constituted, which is by the whims of the wealthy, who still buy into white cultural supremacy,” she said. “I consider it unfortunate Schutz’s painting has become the flashpoint that we are talking about, censorship and whether her art is any good – not art world racism.”

In 1979, the biennial showed an equal number of male and female artists. But in 1987, only 24% of artists shown were women. The feminist art collective Guerrilla Girls a hosted a biennial protest at New York’s Clocktower, where they released statistics that proved how racist and sexist the biennial was in a report called the “Banana Report”.

In 1989, 40% of women showed at the biennial; however 90% of artists showing at the Whitney Biennial were white in 1991. At the most recent biennial in 2014, only nine of 109 artists were black or African American artists. There was controversy around Joe Scanlan’s artwork, where he created a fictional black female character named Donelle Woolford, who was the only black woman in the show. The piece caused such uproar that the black art collective, the YAMS Collective, withdrew from the show as a protest against the Whitney’s policies.

April Reign, the creator of the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag which unveiled the Academy award’s diversity drought, shares her thoughts on Schutz’s painting. “By making Emmett Till’s death abstract art, it almost commercializes the death of a black man and makes it into some entertainment value and that’s concerning,” said Reign.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mamie Till Mobley at her son’s funeral in 1955. Photograph: AP

Carolyn Bryant, who accused Till of making physical and verbal advances towards her in 1955, admits to fabricating her testimony in a new book. “That has reopened a lot of wounds for the Till family and black people in general,” said Reign. “Many of us believed he was unfairly and unjustly convicted of this from decades ago. I wonder how much forethought Schutz put into this work. Exhibiting it probably wasn’t the best idea.”

This isn’t the first time a white artist has used black history in art, Norman Rockwell painted Ruby Bridges, a six-year-old African-American heading to an all-white public school in New Orleans in “The Problem We All Live With” from 1964. New York photographer Danny Lyon dedicated much of his career to photographing them the civil rights movement. This also isn’t the first time art has caused racial-related controversy, as Robert Mapplethorpe’s photo series Black Males from the 1980s was billed as exploitative, and Philip Guston’s paintings of the Ku Klux Klan –which had 4.5 million members in the US during the artist’s childhood – enraged many people.

The work of South African William Kentridge put the apartheid movement in the limelight, which caught the eye of Rankine, who counts herself a fan “for how he positions himself relative to the apartheid movement and the devastation that black people went through in that country”, she said.

“I think anyone who is subject to a culture can use it,” Rankine said. “I don’t think it has anything to do with the race of the artist. It’s more about your positioning in relation to the material. I think that determines how it’s received.”