Not only the Tahitians of Gauguin, the Africans of Picasso, Braque and Matisse, but the African Americans of Mapplethorpe and countless other artists demonstrate how the black body continues to stand for sensuality and sex, possession and power. Primitivism lingers in mapping out the terrain of the black body. In the United States, the African American is the late modern primitive. The legacy of Josephine Baker and Le Revue Negre continues to Hip-Hop. Black culture is the essential signifier for cultural modernism and post-modernism. At issue is agency. Who controls or possesses the black body as an object of desire and economic exploitation affects how we comprehend black culture.

By referencing masterpieces of modern art history Amos focuses particularly on primitivism and the global subjugation of people of color and women in Malcolm X, Morley, Matisse and Me, Overseer, Work Suit (based on a nude self-portrait by Lucien Freud) and One Who Watches (based on Gauguin's Spirit of the Dead Watching, 1892, that, in turn, refers to Edouard Manet's Olympia, 1863). In Work Suit, Amos inversely appropriates the ubiquitous Western image of the male artist holding his palette of paints and brushes with a nude model--usually a reclining woman--before him. Amos's allusions to this and similar canonical works address "the covenant of silence about the prerogatives that white artists have." That symbol of power, the objectification of women, especially black and brown women, refers to the close relationship between colonialism and modernity and post-colonialism and post-modernity. This history of art confirms Amos's own experiences.

In these recent paintings, Amos addresses racism in the professional art community. A particular grievance is against institutions that exhibit or collect only those works by African American artists that show identifiable black figures. Such curatorial choices have compelled Amos to depict a multicolored mix of skin tones and white subjects in her paintings. In response to art market restrictions, some African American artists have censored themselves. As she has remarked, "By calling attention to problems of self-censorship and the compartmentalization of artists by race and gender, I was, and still am, rebelling against the expectation that a black woman does paintings only of and about black people."

Postmodernism typically emphasizes a work of art's representation of social and political history and related issues that take precedence over aesthetics and technical skill. For Emma Amos, they are equally important. Moreover, postmodernist art is not represented by any one avant-garde style. Consequently, Amos can choose without jeopardizing artistic credibility. Her sequence of paintings is anecdotal, but the objective of each is the same: to argue constructively against norms in the field of art as well as society. Her responses are reactive and reflexive; she ably uses her paintings as a means to analyze and assess cultural production, authorship, meaning and consumption. Amos is quintessentially postmodern because she questions the validity of canonical traditions and institutions that for so long have been biased against the inclusion of women and artists of color, especially blacks. By insisting on her own particular perspective, she risks the critical longevity of her work. However, she states, "I accept the idea that my art will become dated. I don't believe work is timeless, but the nuances of meaning may be lost unless you know the history." Look closely at these paintings and remember.

Sharon F. Patton

Sharon F. Patton is the Director of the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, and is the author of African American Art (Oxford University Press, 1998).

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