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 had a brother, Maxwell, and a sister, Caroline.[5]

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.[6] He did not graduate from high school.[6]

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.[7] He was a member of the IRAK graffiti crew in the 1990s and used the tag "SACE/SACER".[4][8][9]

His photographs depict scenes of 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.[4] Artist friends often depicted in Snow's work included Dan Colen, Ryan McGinley, Terence Koh, and his ex-wife Agathe Snow.[4]

In 2005, he had his first solo art exhibition and 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, and Keegan McHargue.[10] With Colen, he created a 2007 installation of shredded phone books in Jeffrey Deitch's SoHo gallery, named Nest or Hamster Nest.[5][11]

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]

Snow's maternal grandfather was Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman, father of actress Uma Thurman. His maternal grandmother was art world fixture and set and costume designer Marie-Christophe de Menil.[12] 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.[13]

At the age of 18, Snow married Corsican-born artist Agathe Aparru.[13] They later divorced. In July 2007, Dash's girlfriend, photo magazine editor Jade Berreau, gave birth to their daughter, whom they named Secret Midnight Magic Nico.[12]

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."[5] He was cremated in New Jersey.

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 to "preserve his (Snow's) legacy" and copyright.[8][9]

The documentary film Moments Like This Never Last (2020), directed by Cheryl Dunn, is about Snow's life.[14]

• Slime The Boogie. Berlin/Los Angeles: Peres Projects, 2007.
• Gang bang at ground zero. New York City: self-published, 2007. Zine. Produced in collaboration with Christopher Snow.
• You Can't Drink It If It's Frozen: the Dash Snow Purple Book. 2007. Olivier Zahm, Purple Fashion Magazine, and Janvier, 2007.
• The End of Living, the Beginning of Survival. Berlin: Contemporary Fine Arts, 2007. ISBN 978-3931355425.
• I'd rather drink muddy water, and sleep in a hollow log. Self-published / Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin, 2007. OCLC 935823668. Includes "Skeletal love" by Raina Hammer.
• God Spoiled a Perfect Asshole When He Put Teeth in Yer Mouth. Berlin/Los Angeles: Peres Projects Holdings, 2007. ISBN 978-0977881994. Published on the occasion of an exhibition at Peres Projects, Los Angeles.
• Nest. New York City: Deitch Projects, 2008. With Dan Colen. ISBN 978-0977868698. Published on the occasion of an exhibition at Deitch Projects, New York City, 2007.
• In the Softest Grey Petals of the Bomb, Lay Your Finger Across my Lips. Los Angeles: Peres Projects, 2009. OCLC 549611230.
• Polaroids. Berlin/Los Angeles: Peres Projects, 2009. ISBN 978-0981765846.
• I love you, stupid!. New York City: D.A.P., 2012. ISBN 9781938922145. Cologne: Walther König, 2013. ISBN 9783863352646.
• Love Roses. New York City: Karma, 2015. ISBN 9780983730736.
• Selected Works From 2001 To 2009. Zurich: Nieves; Geneva: Innen, 2014.
  • Second edition. Zurich: Nieves; Geneva: Innen, 2020. OCLC 1220901922.

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

• Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City[23]
• Brooklyn Museum, New York City[24]
• The Watermill Center[25][26]

• 27 Club

• Dash Snow Interview in Interview magazine
• Denis Kovalev, "Dash Snow", Sgustok Magazine, 2010
• Peres Projects, Berlin Los Angeles
• Dash Snow Appearing in Graf Core 2000