About

Emma Amos, born  in 1937 and raised in Atlanta, Georgia paved her way through the art world via painting, printmaking, and weaving. Her introduction to art and when she started drawing and painting was when she was six years old. As a teenager her work was exhibited at Atlanta University, now known as Clark Atlanta University. At age 17, Amos entered the five-year program at Antioch University in Yellow Springs, Ohio. She went through her fourth year abroad at the London Central School of Art, exploring printmaking, weaving, and painting.

Amos' first solo show was in Atlanta in 1960. A key moment in her career was a few years later in 1967, when she was invited to join an all African American, newly established artist group called Spiral. The group consisted of a number of highly respected and acclaimed artists such as Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, and Hale Woodruff. The group formed as a reaction to the 1963 March on Washington to share ideas surrounding the role of Black artists politically and socially. As the only woman of the group, she learned that as a woman her acceptance into the Black art community was harder to attain compared to her male counterparts. 

Wary of overwhelmingly white women's feminism, Amos kept away from associating with the movement as a whole until 1984, when the author Lucy R. Lippard encouraged her to join the Heresies Collective. She then began joining other groups, including the Guerrilla Girls, a group whose signature is the anonymity of their members. Whenever appearing in public the group wore gorilla masks while challenging not only sexism but racism as well in the art world.

Intersectionality becomes a prominent theme in Amos’s experiences, and therefor in her work. As a Black woman the two struggles of being black in the art world at large and then being a woman in the Black art community can’t make for a breeze of a time. Over the decades, Amos’s work explored intersectionality and how it related to her personal experience through her work.

Amos' work has been recognized has a great and influential contribution to contemporary American art. Her work has been featured in a number of exhibits including “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” at the Tate Modern in London, and “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85,” at the Brooklyn Museum, as well as “Histórias Afro-Atlânticas” at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo and the Tomie Ohtake Institute in São Paulo, Brazil.