Dash Snow

Dashiell "Dash" Snow (July 27, 1981 – July 13, 2009) was an American artist, based in New York.

Dashiell A. Snow was born in 1981, to Taya Thurman and Christopher Snow. 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 (see Schlumberger) and founders of Houston's Menil Collection. His maternal grandfather was Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman, father of actress Uma Thurman, and his maternal grandmother was set and costume designer Marie-Christophe de Menil. He had a brother named Maxwell and a sister named Caroline. He was rebellious as a child and, at 13, was sent to the Hidden Lake Academy in Georgia, a residential treatment center specializing in the treatment of children with oppositional defiant disorder. He did not graduate from high school.

Snow began taking photographs as a teenager, he said, as a record of places he might not remember the next day.

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

Like photographers Nan Goldin, Larry Clark and Ryan McGinley his photos depict scenes of a sex, drug-taking, violence and art-world pretense with candor, documenting the decadent lifestyle of a group of young New York City artists and their social circle.

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.

• USA Today, Royal Academy, London, 2006
• Bienniale, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006
• Babylon, Pergamon Museum, Berlin
• Palais de Tokyo, Paris
• Bergen Kunsthall, Norway
• National Gallery of Denmark, Denmark
• White House Biennial, Athens.

• Francesca Gavin, Dash Snow: An art icon for our times?, The Guardian, 2009-07-15
• White House Biennial, Artists, 2013

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

• Whitney Museum of American Art
• Brooklyn Museum

• "All artists in the collection: As of October 2015", Whitney Museum of American Art
• Patrick Amsellem, Dash Snow, Brooklyn Museum, 2009-05-22

At the age of 18, Snow married Corsican-born artist Agathe Snow. 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.

Snow died on the evening of July 13, 2009, at Lafayette House, a hotel in lower Manhattan. His grandmother Marie-Christophe de Menil was quoted as saying that he died of a drug overdose. A 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."