Emma Amos

"I believe that art is always about something, clothed in a notion, directed to some audience. My own work has centered on framed memory, divining and embellishing history, acting as witness, questioning the uses of the black body in art, making art about art, exploring pattern, inventing images of face and figure, using irony and wishful thinking and fabrication"

–– Emma Amos, 1999

Emma Amos was an artist, educator, and activist who examined the racial, gender, and class dynamics that pervade American history and culture in work across an array of mediums, including painting, printmaking, and textiles.

Raised in segregated Atlanta, Amos was shaped by her upper-middle-class family's vibrant network, which introduced her to distinguished political leaders like Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. Encouraged by her parents, Amos took up art at a young age and taught herself to draw. Amos completed her BFA at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1958 and, in 1959, studied etching at Central School of Art, London (now Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design), while painting gestural abstractions.

Amos moved to New York City in 1960 and soon began working for textile designer and weaver Dorothy Liebes. In 1964, she enrolled in the art education graduate program at New York University. There, she studied with artist and family friend Hale Woodruff and, at his invitation, became the only woman member of the Black artist group Spiral. Spiral's discussions on the challenges facing Black artists in the civil rights era spurred Amos to consider the social and political relevance of color. "Every time I think about color it’s a political statement," Amos stated. By the late 1960s, her practice shifted toward figuration, with women, particularly women of color, emerging as key subjects in her abstractions.

By the 1970s, Amos was married with two children and worked as a weaving instructor for financial support. She made portraits of friends and family, as well as representations of Black women more broadly as confident and self-assured, as in American Girl (1974, SAAM), printed at Robert Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop. Concurrent with feminist revivals of craft, Amos created a public television program Show of Hands (1977–78), which shared craft techniques with mainstream audiences. By 1982, Amos joined women-led feminist organizations including Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics and, in 1985, the Guerrilla Girls, an anonymous group combating art world sexism and racism.

In the 1980s, as Amos began teaching at Rutgers University in New Jersey, she started incorporating textiles into figurative paintings by bordering unstretched canvases with her own handwoven textiles and sourced African kente cloth. Turning to the movement of athletes as her new focus, Amos pictured animated swimmers and runners, like in Winning (1982, SAAM). As the decade ensued, she responded to the economic crisis of the Ronald Reagan administration by placing figures, monuments, and other fragments "up in the air" and in flux. Amos soon confronted her fear of "forgetting history" by turning to her personal heritage, incorporating images of family, women artist friends, mentors, and heroes in works like Will You Forget Me? (1991, NMAAHC and NPG).

In her late career, Amos continued to position her mixed-media creations as counternarratives to Euro-American histories that had long dismissed the presence of women and people of color. As she once stated, "My work sets out to present images worth saving, worth examining, worthy of attention. I want to be a witness."

Authored by Gabriella Shypula, American Women’s History Initiative Writer and Editor, 2024.