Emma Amos

Emma Amos (born March 16, 1937, in Atlanta, Georgia – died May 20, 2020, in Bedford, New Hampshire) was an American artist, educator, and activist whose multidisciplinary practice explored race, gender, identity, labor, and cultural history. Working across painting, printmaking, weaving, textiles, and collage, Amos examined the politics of representation through vibrant color, figuration, pattern, and sustained critique of racism and sexism in the art world.  Amos studied at Antioch College, the London Central School of Art, and New York University. Her work often engages feminism, Black cultural history, self-portraiture, and art-historical critique, using painting, weaving, printmaking, and fabric to consider who gets seen, how bodies are framed, and how Black women move through systems of exclusion and visibility. She was also the only woman and youngest member of Spiral, the important Black artists’ collective formed in 1963.  Her work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum, and in major exhibitions including Soul of a Nation and We Wanted a Revolution. Amos was also a longtime professor and chair at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts. Emma Amos lived and worked in New York.