Dashiell "Dash" Snow was an American artist, based in New New York
Background
Dashiell A. Snow was born in 1981, the son of Taya Thurman and Christopher Snow. He was also a great-grandson of the founders of the Menil Collection in Houston, Dominique de Menil and John de Menil, French aristocrats who were heirs to fortunes based in textiles and oil-drilling equipment (see Schlumberger).
Career
As a child he was rebellious, 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 United States 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.
United States of America Today, Royal Academy, London, 2006 Bienniale,, 2006 Babylon, Pergamon Museum, Berlin Palais de Tokyo, Paris Bergen Kunsthall, Norway National Gallery of Denmark, Denmark White House Biennial, Athens. Snow died on the evening of July 13, 2009, at Lafayette House, a hotel in lower Manhattan.
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.".