Emma Amos is a postmodernist African-American painter and printmaker.

Early life

She was born in America's South on March 16, 1938, in Atlanta, Georgia

Atlanta, Georgia

Atlanta is the capital and most populous city in the U.S. state of Georgia. According to the 2010 census, Atlanta's population is 420,003. Atlanta is the cultural and economic center of the Atlanta metropolitan area, which is home to 5,268,860 people and is the ninth largest metropolitan area in...

 and is of African descent.

Amos studied at Antioch College

Antioch College

Antioch College is a private, independent liberal arts college in Yellow Springs, Ohio, United States. It was the founder and the flagship institution of the six-campus Antioch University system. Founded in 1852 by the Christian Connection, the college began operating in 1853 with politician and...

 in Ohio

Ohio

Ohio is a Midwestern state in the United States. The 34th largest state by area in the U.S.,it is the 7th‑most populous with over 11.5 million residents, containing several major American cities and seven metropolitan areas with populations of 500,000 or more.The state's capital is Columbus...

, at the London Central School of Art

Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design

Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design is a constituent college of the University of the Arts London. The school has an outstanding international reputation, and is considered one of the world's leading art and design institutions...

 in England, and at New York University

New York University

New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...

.

After NYU, she honed her skills at Robert Blackburn

Robert Blackburn (artist)

Robert Blackburn was an African American artist, teacher and printmaker.Born Robert Hamilton Blackburn in Summit, New Jersey in 1920, he grew up in Harlem. He attended P.S...

's Printmaking Workshop, and worked as a designer/weaver for textile master, Dorothy Liebes

Dorothy Liebes

Dorothy Wright Liebes was an American textile designer and weaver renowned for her innovative, custom-designed modern fabrics for architects and interior designers. She was known as "the mother of modern weaving".- Early life :...

.

Career

While attending NYU, she was asked to join Spiral, a group of African-American artists based in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

. In the 1960s she was the only woman in a group that included founders Romare Bearden

Romare Bearden

Romare Bearden was an African American artist and writer. He worked in several media including cartoons, oils, and collage.-Education:...

, Norman Lewis

Norman Lewis

Norman Lewis was a prolific British writer best known for his travel writing. Though not widely known, "Norman Lewis is one of the best writers, not of any particular decade, but of our century", according to Graham Greene....

, Hale Woodruff

Hale Woodruff

Hale Aspacio Woodruff was an African American artist known for his murals, paintings, and prints. One example of his work, the three-panel Amistad Mutiny murals , can be found at Talladega College in Talladega County, Alabama...

 and Charles Alston

Charles Alston

Charles Henry Alston was an African-American painter, sculptor, illustrator, muralist and teacher who lived and worked in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem. Alston was active in the Harlem Renaissance; Alston was the first African American supervisor for the Works Progress Administration's...

.

Amos originated and co-hosted Show of Hands, a crafts show for WGBH Educational TV in Boston

Boston

Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...

 in 1977-79, and later became a Professor at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University

Rutgers University

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...

.

Style

Amos combines printmaking, painting and textile in her self-referential works, usually on linen and large and unframed. She uses acrylic paint, etching, silk screen (collograph, photo transfer effects with iron-on fabric and African textiles, borrowing schema, subject matter and symbols from European art while pictorially quoting artists like Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin

Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a leading French Post-Impressionist artist. He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, print-maker, ceramist, and writer...

, Morley

Malcolm Morley

Malcolm Morley is an English artist now living in the United States. He is best known as a photorealist.-Early life:Morley was born in north London. He had a troubled childhood, and did not discover art until serving a three-year stint in Wormwood Scrubs prison...

, Lucien Freud, and Matisse. Amos demonstrates the deconstructive licence of postmodernist works in her use of applications from several disciplines on the same picture plane, making a "seamless work of art".

As well as bordering her paintings with African fabric, Amos sews, appliques, embroiders and occasionally quilt

Quilt

A quilt is a type of bed cover, traditionally composed of three layers of fiber: a woven cloth top, a layer of batting or wadding and a woven back, combined using the technique of quilting. “Quilting” refers to the technique of joining at least two fabric layers by stitches or ties...

s with her own weavings, Kente cloth

Kente cloth

Kente cloth, known locally as nwentoma, is a type of silk and cotton fabric made of interwoven cloth strips and is native to the Akan people of Ghana and the Ivory Coast.- Etymology :...

 and batik

Batik

Batik is a cloth that traditionally uses a manual wax-resist dyeing technique. Batik or fabrics with the traditional batik patterns are found in Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan, China, Azerbaijan, India, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Nigeria, Senegal, and Singapore.Javanese traditional batik, especially from...

s. The scale and textural layering of the work according to Patton, resembles "the form of European prestige tapestries and the African diaspora

African diaspora

The African diaspora was the movement of Africans and their descendants to places throughout the world—predominantly to the Americas also to Europe, the Middle East and other places around the globe...

."

Art museum director, Sharon Patton, summarises her oeuvre thus:

[Amos's] 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.

External links

• Oral history interview with Emma Amos, 1968 Oct. 3 from the Smithsonian Archives of American Art
  Archives of American Art
  The Archives of American Art is the largest collection of primary resources documenting the history of the visual arts in the United States. More than 16 million items of original material are housed in the Archives' research centers in Washington, D.C...