Emma Amos
Emma Amos
1938 - 2020
African American painter, printmaker and weaver. Amos studied fine arts and textile weaving at Antioch College at Yellow Springs, OH, where she received her BFA in 1958. She went on to study etching and painting at the Central School of Art, London (1958–9), and the following year she moved to New York, where she began working at two printmaking studios: ROBERT BLACKBURN’s workshop and that of Letterio Calapai (an outpost of Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17). She completed her MA at New York University in 1966. Through HALE WOODRUFF, an art professor at NYU and family friend, she was invited to exhibit with SPIRAL, an all-male art group founded by Woodruff and ROMARE BEARDEN and featuring recognized African American artists. Spiral, closely allied with the Civil Rights movement, dissolved in 1967 and subsequently Amos had trouble exhibiting her work. In 1974, after the birth of her two children, Amos found a position as an instructor in textile design at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts. She continued her own weaving in New York and benefited from the revival of interest in women’s traditional art forms in the early years of the feminist art movement.
In 1980 Amos became a professor of art at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, NJ. She began teaching drawing, painting, and intaglio printmaking. Her own work included a series of etchings and aquatints of women of colour. The Water series, a synthesis of Amos’s interest in painting, printmaking and weaving, began shortly after she was awarded tenure at Rutgers in 1985. The vivid, semi-abstract works include bathers, Olympic swimmers and creatures of the sea. Conveying both tension and exuberance, the human subjects are captured in dramatic positions to emphasize their sense of movement through space. The series includes passages in acrylic combined with borders of Kente cloth, woven linen, or batik. The Falling series, begun in 1988, was exhibited at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, in 1991. Amos developed the dynamic effect of her figures falling through space, calling it ‘absolute movement’ (as in Equals). The series has been associated with the difficulties of the time for the underprivileged, but Amos also portrayed the triumph of certain African Americans, including Jackie Joyner-Kersee (b 1962), the Olympic gold medallist, whose dynamic form seems to rise upward or leap forward. Amos went on to explore the construction of beauty in visual cultures. Her models included herself, as well as historical portrayals of royal women, such as images from Benin culture, and more recent conceptions of female beauty. Amos uses cloth to deconstruct the idea of African art and magical powers, often introducing historical references that reveal gender issues or racial tensions. Other ‘heroes’ appeared in later works, such as a portrait of Picasso emblazoned on an apron and surrounded by African herdsmen, sculptures from Africa and Amos’s own portrait (see Muse Picasso). After the death of her husband in 2005, Amos took a new direction in her art, introducing more subtle passages of colour. The forms, previously clearly delineated, became more abstract, introducing richly symbolic content. Later paintings by Amos replace ancestor worship with a focus on self-analysis and self-reference, including self-portraits and images of friends.
Amos’s works have been shown in numerous solo exhibitions and her works have been exhibited in museums throughout the USA. She has also received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. [Joan Marter. "Amos, Emma." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 3, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T2021445.]
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