Emma Amos was driven by a profound conviction that what she had to say was worth saying—regardless of its reception from the art world. “I think the civil rights movement made me more critical about what I was doing. I could not in good conscience paint just lovely pictures with brushy strokes without having some of the pain and angst of the things that I wanted to say about women, Black women in particular, in the sixties. I did that, but without anybody telling me what to do, or anybody looking at the work, or any of the men responding to it in any way,” Amos told the feminist thinker bell hooks in 1993. “The work was never shown.”
Amos was born in segregated Atlanta in an upper-class, college-educated Black family that rubbed shoulders with W. E. B. Dubois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Martin Luther King Jr. She was encouraged to pursue her passion for art from a young age, studying painting and printmaking at Antioch College and London’s Central School of Art before moving to New York and joining the city’s burgeoning scene of Downtown artists. In 1964, she became the youngest and only woman member of Spiral, an important collective of Black artists. During this time, she worked as a weaver for textile designer Dorothy Liebes. This experience had an important impact on Amos’s practice, and she would go on to incorporate African Kente cloths and her own weavings in many of her paintings and prints.
Throughout her career, Amos remained true to her commitment to make art that reflected her experiences as a Black woman. She frequently demonstrated a deep preoccupation with skin tone: the figures in her work were habitually depicted in a wide variety of fleshy colors, ranging from butterscotch, chocolate brown, beige, pink, and ochre to black. Sometimes, she integrated these varieties of skin tones on the same person with a white arm, a brown leg, and a black face, for example.
Though the politics of Amos’s work remained steadfast throughout her career, she worked in distinct series. In the 1960s, she was working on her Attitude paintings and prints, in which she depicted herself in bold, colorful compositions. In the 1970s, the carefree nature of this series matured into reflections of her newfound dual identity as a mother and an artist. She made few paintings during this time, but generated landmark prints at Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop. These prints depicted women doing leisure activities, which led her to investigate the racialized politics of water and swimming in her Bathers series, depicting Black women in swimsuits. An interest in bodies in motion and sports gave rise to her Athletes and Animals series of the 1980s, in which she considered the beauty, grace, “otherness,” and fleeting power of Black athletes and exotic animals.
Amos was concerned with memory and being forgotten before ever being noticed, as demonstrated by her important Falling Figures series (1986–2006), which depicted a variety of brown and Black bodies hurtling towards the abyss. She credited the extraordinary movement that appeared throughout her work to her burgeoning and, later, blooming understanding of her tenuous position as an artist who was both a woman and Black. The vivacity of Amos’s line, her unflinching gaze at unpleasant realities of American society, was reflective of an in-your-face artistic practice that went on to incorporate photo transfers of enslaved people, sharecroppers, overseers, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Confederate flag.
Frustrated by the lack of visibility afforded to women, Amos took her activism to the next level in 1984, when she became a founding member of the Guerrilla Girls. She was also on the editorial board of Heresies, an important feminist group and publication in New York City. Her work remained deeply entrenched in both the liberation of women and the elevation of Black people. For her, one was not possible without the other. Her practice took both threads and wove them together.
Ethel Renia, independent scholar, 2024
