Emma Amos

Emma Amos was raised in Atlanta, Georgia where she began painting and drawing at the age of six. After self-teaching and formal instruction, she enrolled in a five-year professional art program at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. During her fourth year, she studied abroad at London Central School of Art, where she majored in Etching. After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts from Antioch in 1958, she returned to London to receive her diploma the following year. Upon returning to the United States in 1960, Amos began showing work at Alexander Gallery in Atlanta, GA. She then relocated to New York that year, where she worked as an assistant teacher and a weaver in the studio of renowned textile designer, Dorothy Liebes.

Emma Amos, Sand and her husband, 1973, oil on canvas, 112.4 x 127.6 cm, © Emma Amos, Ryan Lee Gallery, New York

While studying for her Master’s Degree in Art Education at New York University, Amos joined Spiral – an active collective of African-American artists led by veteran artist Romare Bearden. The collective was committed to exploring questions of political engagement and formal innovation. As the youngest and the sole woman in Spiral, she was heavily influenced by the group’s members. However, by the time she received her master’s degree in 1966, the group had disbanded. She and her husband, Bobby Levine, had two children during this time, and she raised them while she continued working as a designer, illustrator, and weaver. Amos enjoyed a long teaching career – first teaching at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art and later, at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where she served as a tenured professor until her retirement in 2008.

Emma Amos, Flower Sniffer, 1966, Collection of the Brooklyn Museum, New York, © Emma Amos, Courtesy Ryan Lee Gallery, New York

Amos was no stranger to the difficulties of navigating the art world as a Black woman. While her work from the 1960s and 1970s focused on themes of Black middle-class domestic life drenched in color and abstract forms (Flower Snifer, 1996), later works revealed a greater emphasis on selfhood and identity with an experimental approach to materials. Openly confronting and complicating issues such as racial ambiguity, Blackness, and womanhood — her work was highly political in relation to the White, male-dominated art world. She would go on to write for the feminist journal Heresies, co-founded by Lucy Lippard, as a member of the New York-based Heresies collective in 1984, and later became involved with other art-centric feminist groups such as the Guerrilla Girls.

Emma Amos, Head First, 2006, © Emma Amos, Courtesy Ryan Lee Gallery, New York

Although long recognized as an expansive artist and thinker, Amos has only recently gained a mainstream museum audience, coinciding with the last years of her life, with the inclusion of her work in the major exhibitions Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, initiated by the Tate Modern, London, and We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85, initiated by the Brooklyn Museum in 2017. In 2018 her work was featured in the show Histórias Afro-Atlânticas at the Museu de Arte de Saõ Paulo and the Tomi Ohtake Institute, both in Saõ Paulo, Brazil. She was also celebrated with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art, USA, in 2008. The first career retrospective of her work took place in 2021: Emma Amos: Color Odyssey, organized by Shawnya Harris, the Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson Curator of African American and African Diasporic Art at the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, Georgia.