Introduction

Emma Amos (born in Atlanta in 1938) always knew she would be an artist. As a woman of African descent she dared to dream to be a professional painter and printmaker. After graduating from Antioch College in Ohio, Central School of Art in London and New York University (NYU), she honed her skills at Robert Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop, and worked as a designer/weaver for textile master, Dorothy Liebes. While attending NYU, she was asked to join Spiral, a group of black artists that included Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, Hale Woodruff and Charles Alston. Amos originated and co-hosted Show of Hands, a crafts show for WGBH Educational TV in Boston in 1977-79, and later became a Professor at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.

Blurring the distinction between "high" and "low" art, Emma Amos's explorations in different media--etching, monoprints, silk collagraphs, photography, painting, fibre, sewing--result in seamless works of art. Amos incorporates fibres and printed cloths which, when combined with gestural strokes of paint, create fields of color and texture that enmesh drawn and painted figures and photographic images. In her paintings, she exploits the tensions between photographic and painted illusion. She has always found photography "interesting because it seems not to lie when in fact it does--it's very selective about what it shows." Moreover, bordering her paintings with African fabrics, Amos sews, appliques, embroiders and occasionally quilts with her own weavings, Kente cloth and batiks. Her large canvases hang unstretched, evoking, at once, the form of European prestige tapestries and the African diaspora.

During the course of her artistic career, Amos has been deeply involved in feminism and the politics of culture. Collaboration and friendships with women artists, involvement with feminist publications like Heresies and M/E/A/N/I/N/G, and awareness of the exclusion of women and people of color from the critical discourse and scholarship about modern and contemporary art, have galvanized Emma Amos. She understands that cultural production affects social values and norms--how we view others and ourselves. In other words, art matters.

Amos's exhibition, Changing the Subject, 1994, at Art in General, New York, was a watershed event, for it marked publicly a maturation of her political content and aesthetic and technical virtuosity. Amos's signature style, growing out of the late 1980s to early 1990s, is an amalgam of an often highly charged political critique and a dynamic color field that acts as a backdrop for her multi-vocal dialectic surrounding issues of representation. With historical and political references that center upon race and gender in the series Changing the Subject, Amos notes, for example, in Tightrope, 1994, that she "looks autobiographically at race, sex, and identity." Her interest in herself as a pictorial subject continues from earlier work. Yet, in this painting she aligns her identity not only with women of color but with all women. The title easily conveys the idea of people who precariously juggle the demands life and society thrust upon them-matriarchs, mothers, wives, impoverished people and people of color. In Tightrope, Emma, who wears an American flag/"Wonder-Woman" leotard (obscured by a black negligée), is both warrior and seductress; the attributes of true womanhood are veiled by popular conceptions of womanhood.

Next, there is the subject of exclusion. X's proliferate in Tightrope and other paintings. The "X"-mark denotes cancellation, deletion, invisibility, absence and error. X's represent for Amos, "how hardly anyone gives a damn what I say as an artist or what black people have to say." "X" also refers to Malcolm X (who continues to be an esteemed black political figure in Africa and the U.S.) and what "X" symbolized -a canceling of the slave-name and the legacy of slavery. Further examination of Tightrope reveals another subject: colonialism. Amos, the tightrope walker, achieves delicate balance holding artist brushes in one hand and a shirt depicting "Mrs. Gauguin's" breasts in the other. Red arrows in the corners of the painting point to the pictorial source of Amos's shirt: the late nineteenth century artist Paul Gauguin's Two Tahitian Women with Mangoes, 1899. After reading Gauguin's journals, Amos comments, "I considered him anew and imagined he must have abused Te Ha Amana, the thirteen-year-old second 'Mrs. Gauguin,' whom he bought from her father to be his model, housekeeper, concubine and intermediary to the island's people." Would Gauguin be the famous post-Impressionist artist if it were not for the assistance and presence of Te Ha Amana, and for Tahitian culture? Te Ha Amana's plight serves as an inspiration for several other paintings in this exhibition, including The Overseer, 1992, One Who Watches, 1995 and Malcolm X, Morley, Matisse and Me, 1993.

Continued