Dash Snow - Dash Snow Polaroids - 2009

Dash Snow was an American multimedia artist, known for his work that embodied a drug-fueled rebellious lifestyle. Working with photographs, collages, sculptures and even his own semen, he created works that captured the hedonistic world of both himself and his social circle of artists, particularly Dan Colen, Nate Lowman and Ryan McGinley. Snow developed his aesthetic during his youth, befriending street artists in Tompkins Square Park and the Lower East while doing graffiti illegally as a teenager. He began taking Polaroid photographs as a way to document the places he had been during the blackouts, and these photographs, which candidly captured sex, drugs, and violence, became a signature element of his work. Born on July 27, 1981 in New York, NY, Snow came from a family of prestigious art collectors and a descendant of the Schulmberger fortune, but he clashed and became estranged from much of his family. At a young age, Snow exhibited at the 2006 Whitney Biennial, and his works are collected by the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the New Museum in New York, among others. His career was cut short with his death from a drug overdose on July 13, 2009 in New York, NY, at the age of 27.