Emma Amos: Color Odyssey

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Emma Amos (1937 – 2020) was a distinguished painter and printmaker. She is best known for her bold and colorful mixed-media paintings that create visual tapestries in which she examines the intersection of race, class, gender and privilege in both the art world and society at large. This survey exhibition includes approximately 60 works from the beginnings of her career to the end of it, reflecting her experiences as a painter, printmaker, and weaver. Her large-scale canvases often incorporate African fabrics and semiautobiographical content, which are drawn from her personal odyssey as an artist, her interest in icons in art and world history and her sometimes tenuous engagement with these themes as a woman of color.

Amos’ work challenges the norms of Western art tradition with her unique narrative painting style characterized by an expressive use of color, which animates her compositions and pushes the visual boundaries of desire and difference. She also combined lithography, intaglio, collage and laser transfer methods learned independently or through the workshops of important figures such as Robert Blackburn and Kathy Caraccio to make prints and monotypes. The exhibition serves as a study of the complex themes of identity politics and difference shaping Amos’ body of work. It examines works dating from her formative years in the 1960s to her participation in the feminist and multicultural debates of the late 20th and early 21st century.

Amos graduated from Antioch College in Ohio in 1958 and the Central School of Art in London in 1959. She subsequently moved to New York soon joining such prominent African American artists as Romare Bearden, Hale Woodruff, Norman Lewis and Charles Alston as the sole female member of the group Spiral. In 1965, she earned her master of arts degree from New York University and later taught art at the Dalton School in New York. A feminist activist, she was an important member of the Heresies collective, founded in 1976 by artists and activists Joyce Kozloff, Miriam Schapiro and Lucy Lippard, among others. Amos was a professor of visual arts at the Mason Gross School of Art at Rutgers University for 28 years and served as chair of the department, too. Her work is held in various collections including the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers; the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Brooklyn Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City; the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, New York; the Birmingham Museum of Art; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the British Museum, London; the Cleveland Museum of Art; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; and the Georgia Museum of Art, among others, many of which are lending to the exhibition, alongside numerous private collectors.

In recent years, Amos’ paintings have been featured in important traveling exhibitions, including the Tate Modern’s “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power” and the Brooklyn Museum’s “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85.” Amos received the Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson prize from the Georgia Museum of Art in 2016, and in the same year, the Studio Museum in Harlem honored her as an “Icon,” along with artists Faith Ringgold and Lorraine O’Grady.

The museum has published a scholarly exhibition catalogue to accompany the show, with essays by Shawnya Harris, Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson Curator of African American and African Diasporic Art at the Georgia Museum of Art; Lisa Farrington of Howard University; artist LaToya Ruby Frazier; Laurel Garber, Park Family Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; artist Kay Walkingstick; and Phoebe Wolfskill, associate professor in the departments of American studies and African American and African Diaspora studies at Indiana University.

The exhibition will travel to the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute from June 19 to September 12, 2021, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art from October 11, 2021, to January 2, 2022.

Virtual Discussion: “Emma Amos: Color Odyssey” from Georgia Museum of Art on Vimeo.