Emma Amos

Emma Amos (16 March 1937 – 20 May 2020) was a postmodern African-American painter and printmaker.

Early life Amos was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1937 to India DeLaine Amos and Miles Green Amos. She also has an older brother named Larry. Amos took an interest in art at an early age, creating "masses of paper dolls" and learning figure drawing from issues of Esquire and the art of Alberto Vargas, was painting the figure by the age of nine. Her mother had aspirations of Amos studying with Hale Woodruff, but he did not accept many private students and left the area before she had the opportunity to study with him.

At eleven, Amos took a course at Morris Brown College, where she worked on her draftsmanship and took note of the work that African American college students were producing at the time. By high school, Amos was submitting her work to Atlanta University art shows. She graduated from Booker T. Washington High School in Atlanta at the age of 16, and applied to Antioch College, because of their progressive policies. While at Antioch, Amos worked for half of the year, and studied for the remainder. She worked in Chicago, New York, and in Washington, D.C., which enabled her to visit galleries and museums, which had been less accessible in Atlanta. Her fourth year at Antioch, she went to England and studied at the London Central School of Art, where she learned to print and etch under Anthony Harrison, and began to paint with oils, which she had not done before. Amos received her BFA degree from Antioch in 1958, then went back to London for her degree in etching, which she received in 1959 after two years of study. Amos was told by both Cooper Union and the Art Students League that they were not hiring after she applied for a teaching position. The difficulty of entering work into galleries led her to teach as an assistant at the Dalton School where she met artists and was introduced to the New York and East Hampton art scene, where she experienced difficulty showing her work in a "man's scene." It was also around this time that Emma Amos began her career as a textile designer, working for the weaver and colorist Dorothy Liebes, where her designs were translated into unique carpets.

In New York, Amos joined the printmaking studios of Letterio Calapai (a part of Stanley William Hayter's Paris Atelier 17) and Robert Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop. Prior to Spiral, Amos was resistant towards the idea of "Black art" and galleries that only showed work by African Americans, but she came to understand that these were often the only options available to black artists at the time, and also learned how to integrate race and sex politics into her work without her work becoming dominated by the process of political engagement.

Amos designed the memorial for Ralph Abernathy a civil rights leader and activist, which is made up of four installations and is located in the Ralph David Abernathy Memorial Park in Atlanta, GA.

Her piece Measuring Measuring (1995) was used as the front cover image for the African American women artists historical text, Creating Their Own Image: The History of the African American Women Artists by Lisa E. Farrington.

Between 2025 and 2026, Emma Amos' work was featured in Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture, which traveled from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, to the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida.

Style

Amos combined printmaking, painting and textile in her self-referential works, usually on linen, large scale, and unframed. She used acrylic paint, etching, silkscreen, collagraph, photo transfer effects with iron-on fabric, and African textiles. She borrowed schema, subject matter and symbols from European art while pictorially quoting artists like Paul Gauguin, Malcolm Morley, Lucian Freud, and Henri Matisse. Amos demonstrated the deconstructive license of postmodernist works in her use of applications from several disciplines on the same picture plane, making a "seamless work of art." The scale and textural layering of the work resembles forms often found in European prestige tapestries and the African diaspora.

Feminism

Amos admitted that being from the South, as an African American woman, she had always been aware of the adversities she faced in her everyday life. However, in relation to Feminism, Amos did not become actively involved until the late 1980s. Before this time, in the early 1970s, while raising children, Amos was invited to join a Feminist Group of artists that met in New York City parks. When choosing whether or not to attend, Amos stated, "From what I heard of feminist discussions in the park, the experiences of black women of any class were left out. I came from a line of working women who were not only mothers, but breadwinners, cultured, educated, and who had been treated as equals by their black husbands. I felt I could not afford to spend precious time away from studio and family to listen to stories so far removed from my own." She edited the collective's journal Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics.

Emma Amos was also a member of the anonymous feminist group Guerilla Girls and used the pseudonym Zora Neale Hurston. Amos was also briefly involved with A.I.R. or Artists in Residency Gallery, known for being the first artist-run gallery for women in the United States of America. For numerous years, Amos also attended meetings with the group, Fantastic Women in the Arts. This group also explored the artwork and writings of many female artists, but also focused on how the revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, concerning education on racism and sexism, failed to actually make any difference for black Americans or women. It is in this group that Amos discussed the privilege of white Americans, and how that was evident in the arts in everyday life. In 2021, Emma Amos: Color Odyssey, a retrospective of her work organized by Shawnya Harris, opened at Georgia Museum of Art before traveling.

Amos' work was included in the 2022 exhibition Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Her work was included in the 2024 exhibition Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).

Notable works in public collections

Without Feather Boa (1965), Cleveland Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Whitney Museum, New York Baby (1966), Whitney Museum, New York Flower Sniffer (1966), Brooklyn Museum, New York Godzilla (1968), Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, New York Summer, 1968 (1968), Minnesota Museum of American Art, Saint Paul 3 Ladies (1970), Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Philadelphia Museum of Art Sandy and Her Husband (1973), Cleveland Museum of Art American Girl (1974), British Museum, London; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; and Smithsonian American Art Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Dream Girl (1975), Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Pool Lady (1980), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Sand Tan (1980), Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. To Sit (With Pochoir) (1981), Baltimore Museum of Art; Philadelphia Museum of Art; and Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey Out in Front (1982), Minneapolis Institute of Art Winning (1982), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Black Dog Blues (1983), Art Institute of Chicago Take One (1985-1987), Museum of Modern Art, New York Equals (1992), Detroit Institute of Arts Mississippi Wagon 1937 (1992), British Museum, London Baggage (1993), Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut Reminders GA & FL (1994), Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts Sold (1994), Whitney Museum, New York; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut Tightrope (1994), Minneapolis Institute of Art About Whiteness (Red) (1995), Whitney Museum, New York Measuring, Measuring (1995), Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama Solo (1999), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Crown (2002), Minneapolis Institute of Art; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey Miss Otis (2002), Philadelphia Museum of Art; and Telfair Museums, Savannah, Georgia How Time Flies (2004), Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, Massachusetts; and National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Identity (2006), Museum of Modern Art, New York; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; and Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey