Emma Amos (b. 1937, Atlanta) was raised in a well-educated, well-connected family whose social circle was said to include figures such as Booker T. Washington and Zora Neale Hurston. At sixteen, she left Atlanta for Antioch College in Ohio, earning a B.A. in Fine Art. During her studies, she spent time in London and received a diploma in etching from the Central School of Art. After returning to the U.S. in 1960, she worked for the pioneering textile designer Dorothy Liebes (1961–72). At the same time, she completed an M.F.A. in Art Education at NYU, studying lithography with Robert Blackburn. She was invited to join the Spiral collective—alongside Romare Bearden, Charles Alston, and Norman Lewis, becoming its first and only female member. Originally committed to abstraction, she increasingly brought figuration into her work as the civil rights movement gathered momentum.

After the birth of her daughter, Amos focused on quilting, illustration, and weaving, and co-hosted WGBH Boston’s craft how-to program “Show of Hands.” In the late 1970s she returned to painting. Her mature style combined saturated color and dynamic subjects with her own weavings and vibrant African textiles. Athletic bodies running, dancing, and diving recur throughout this period; by the late 1980s, figures appear to fall or fly. Following a 1979 solo at the Art Salon, she began teaching at Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts (NJ), eventually becoming a full professor and chair of the art department.

Amos was unflinching in her engagement with race, gender, and politics. In later works she appropriated and reexamined canonical imagery, especially that of Picasso and Gauguin, exposing the racist and sexist currents within art history, and often inserting herself directly into the scenes.

“She would picture herself countering the obstacles of the art world or challenging well-known artists that she may have admired, but then she began to take a second look at what they were actually communicating about women, power.”
—Shawnya L. Harris, curator of Emma Amos: Color Odyssey, Georgia Museum of Art, 2021

Beyond the studio, Amos served as an editor of Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics and was a member of the confrontational Guerrilla Girls, an affiliation not confirmed until after her death. The anonymous collective, known for gorilla masks and pseudonyms drawn from women artists of the past, spotlighted the underrepresentation of women in museum exhibitions and gallery rosters through pointed, public interventions.

Ref: Duron, Maximiliano. “How Emma Amos’s Art and Activism Powerfully Confronted Racism and Sexism.” ARTnews.Com, ARTnews.com, 30 Apr. 2021, www.artnews.com/feature/emma-amos-who-is-she-why-is-she-important-1234591424/.