Emma Amos

Three Quarter Time, 2001

Collagraph Monoprint

Image size: 15 3/4" x 25 3/4"

Paper size: 22 1/4" x 30"

Estimated value $3500

Printed by the artist

Emma Amos (1937-2020) was a pioneering artist, educator, and activist. A dynamic painter and masterful colorist, her commitment to interrogating the art-historical status quo yielded a body of vibrant and intellectually rigorous work. Influenced by modern Western European art, Abstract Expressionism, the Civil Rights movement and feminism, Amos was drawn to exploring the politics of culture and issues of racism, sexism, and ethnocentrism in her art. "It's always been my contention," Amos once said, "that for me, a black woman artist, to walk into the studio is a political act." Amos became a member of Spiral, an important African-American collective in 1964, but found that the effort for black representation in the art world often omitted women. She then became involved in various underground feminist collectives, including Heresies from 1982 to 1993, and the trailblazing Guerilla Girls group after its founding in 1985.

Born in segregated Atlanta, GA, Amos graduated from Antioch College in Ohio in 1958 and went on to study at the Central School of Art in London. Upon finishing her studies in England, Amos moved to New York City. Though she eventually became active in the downtown arts scene, working alongside prominent artists such as Romare Bearden, Hale Woodruff, Norman Lewis, Alvin Hollingsworth and Charles Alston, Amos struggled to find her footing in the city, finding that considerable obstacles were drawn up against her because of her age, gender and race. She earned her Masters in Arts from New York University in 1965 and went on to teach art at the Dalton School in New York. In 1980, she became a professor and later chair of the Visual Arts department at the Mason Gross School of Art at Rutgers University. She taught there for 28 years.

In 2016, Amos received the Georgia Museum of Art's Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson award and was honored by the Studio Museum in Harlem as an Icon and Trailblazer, along with Faith Ringgold and Lorraine O'Grady.

Amos has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions including at the Montclair Museum; the Newark Museum, NJ; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Brooklyn Museum. Emma Amos: Color Odyssey, a retrospective of Amos's work, will open at the Georgia Museum of Art in 2021 and will travel to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in New York.

Her work is held in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Bass Museum of Art, FL; Birmingham Museum of Art, AL; British Museum, London; Bronx Museum of Art, NY; Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY; James F. Byrnes Institute, Germany; Museo de las Artes, Mexico; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Minneapolis Museum of Art, MN; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Newark Museum, NJ; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, and Yale University Art Gallery, CT, among others.

The Estate of Emma Amos is represented by Ryan Lee Gallery, NYC