Artist Highlight: Emma Amos

Emma Amos (1937-2020) was a painter, printmaker, and weaver. She is known for her ability to experiment and combine textiles and painting while using color to emphasize the themes of her work. The profound dialogue Amos’s work makes about the issues of race and gender was to share that the course of art history needs to have a reckoning. Often Emma shared that “the idea that painting is a political act”, and in contemporary art world allowed for her to “make work in this moment”, to talk about racism and sexism in a way that could be felt. “Amos found potential in color, cloth, and the human figure to transgress visually so-called “natural” boundaries and societal norms.

We have three of Amos’s works in the Crystal Bridges collection and one that stands out in our current collection gives some of Emma Amos’s best qualities all in one. The Reader, 1967 will be on view in the Contemporary Gallery.

Powerful aspects of Amos’s life were her marriage, motherhood, teaching, and her artistic practice. All influenced one another in such a way that she expressed the want to change the conversations of what Black art and women’s art are. She married Bobby Levine and had two children, Nicholas and India. Her teaching career started in 1974 at the Newark School of Industrial Arts and she retired from Rutgers University in 2008. Amos’s practice consisted of developing and hosting a craft show, “Show of Hands,” after her daughter was born, she turned to a more illustrative style and worked on Sesame Street Magazine while gaining a tenure track position that included teaching courses in printmaking, painting, and drawing.

Amos’s practice is best described in her artist statement, “…desire to express the materiality of her paintings through “free-floating” or unstretched canvases, with painting, collage, and weaving as staples in her practice…”. Throughout her life and practice, she has had many exhibitions and influenced an entire generation of artists.

When in conversation about painting, she said, “Load up your brush! We are painters and the art should show that! Let’s see the paint!” and that is how her use of color blocking actively engaged her figural and abstract paintings. Painting took hold of Amos because of the ability to give social relevance and enable the path for Emma, a Black woman, mother, and artist, to be a “renaissance” in her own right, that painting wasn’t just a man’s world. The way that she used movement, figurative, layers, textures, and scale to guide the impact of what the works meant to her. Each painting blended her calling to make art and have a distinct way of being known in the art world as a “staunch supporter” of women artists and how she depicted Black people in her works, especially Black women. “It got to the point where I wanted the color, I wanted the brown skin against red backgrounds and I really wanted the texture and the look and the whole thing. And I think it’s definitely that I’ve become aware of Black people and that black is beautiful and there is nothing wrong with it.”

Having Amos’s work in the Crystal Bridges collection has the ability to influence the next generation of artists. A quote to leave you thinking about the power of art is this, “The work reflects my investigations into the otherness often seen by white male artists, along with the notion of desire, the dark body versus the white body, racism, and my wish to provoke more thoughtful ways of thinking and seeing.”

Ready to see Emma Amos’s work for yourself? Visit our Plan a Visit page to learn more about Campus Parking and start planning your next visit to the museum.