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 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 ... the canvas makes material the deep cuts and lacerations portrayed in the original photo by means of cardboard relief."