Dash Snow

Dashiell A. Snow was born in 1981, to Taya Thurman and musician Christopher Snow and grew up on the Upper West Side neighborhood of New York City.[5] He a had brother named Maxwell and a sister named Caroline.[5] His maternal grandfather was Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman, father of actress Uma Thurman. His maternal grandmother was an art world fixture and set and costume designer Marie-Christophe de Menil.[6] He was a great-grandson of Dominique de Menil and John de Menil, French aristocrats who were heirs to fortunes based in textiles and oil-drilling equipment (from the Schlumberger oil dynasty) and founders of Houston's Menil Collection.[7]

He was rebellious as a child and, at 13,[1] was sent to the Hidden Lake Academy in Georgia, a residential treatment center specializing in the treatment of children with oppositional defiant disorder.[8] He did not graduate from high school.[8]

Snow began taking photographs as a teenager, he said, as a record of places he might not remember the next day, mostly due to hard partying.[9] He was prominent member of the IRAK graffiti crew in the 1990s and used the tag “SACE/SACER”.[4][10][11]

In 2005 he had his first solo art exhibition and he was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial.[5]

In 2006, Snow was included in The Wall Street Journal article titled "The 23-Year Old Masters", which profiled 10 emerging U.S. artists including Rosson Crow, Ryan Trecartin, Zane Lewis, Barney Kulok, Jordan Wolfson, Rashawn Griffin and Keegan McHargue.[12]

He was close friends with artist Dan Colen, with whom he created the well-known 2007 installation of shredded phone books in Jeffrey Deitch’s SoHo gallery, called Nest or Hamster Nest.[5][13]

Some of Snow's later collage-based work was characterized by his practice of using his own semen as a material applied to or splashed across newspaper photographs of police officers and other authority figures.[4]

• 2006 – USA Today, Royal Academy, London[4]
• 2006 – Biennale, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City[4][5]
• 2008 – Babylon: Myth and Truth, Pergamon Museum, Berlin[14]
• 2013– Exercises on Democracy, a traveling exhibition, White House Biennial, Athens, Greece[15][16]
• Palais de Tokyo, Paris
• Bergen Kunsthall, Norway
• National Gallery of Denmark, Denmark

Snow's work is held in the following public collections:

• Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City[17]
• Brooklyn Museum, New York City[18]
• The Watermill Center[19][20]

At the age of 18, Snow married Corsican-born artist Agathe Snow.[7] They later split up and divorced. In July 2007, Dash's then-girlfriend, photo magazine editor Jade Berreau, gave birth to their daughter, whom they named Secret Midnight Magic Nico.[6]

Snow died on the evening of July 13, 2009, at Lafayette House, a hotel in lower Manhattan.[2] His grandmother Marie-Christophe de Menil was quoted as saying that he died of a drug overdose.[3] The New York Times article commented that Snow "met a junkie’s end but did so in a $325-a-night hotel room with an antique marble hearth."[21] He was cremated in New Jersey. He is considered a member of the 27th Club, along with Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and many others who also died at the age of twenty seven. In 2016, Snow's estate sued McDonald's with a request to remove the tag "SACE" from the graffiti-themed interior design used in the European market, in order to "preserve his (Snow's) legacy" and copyright.[10][11]

• Ariel Levy, "Chasing Dash Snow", New York Magazine, 2007-11-25
• Holland Cotter, "Art in Review; Dash Snow", The New York Times, 2006-10-13
• Dash Snow Interview in Interview magazine
• Denis Kovalev, "Dash Snow", Sgustok Magazine, 2010-01-16
• Peres Projects, Berlin Los Angeles
• Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin
• Alan Feuer and Allen Salkin "Terrible End for an Enfant Terrible" The New York Times / N.Y. Region, 2009-07-24
• Gradient Magazine
• Dash Snow Appearing in Graf Core 2000