Emma Amos: Self-Portraits
Ryan Lee Gallery’s booth @ Frieze London
October 12 – 16, 2022
Work Suit, 1994
© Estate of Emma Amos, courtesy RYAN LEE
RYAN LEE presents Emma Amos: Self Portraits, a selection of landmark paintings by the pioneering artist and activist EMMA AMOS (b. 1937—d. 2020). A celebrated artist, Amos was known for her experimentation in both subject matter and material throughout her work. She was an original Guerilla Girl and the only female member of the influential African American artist group Spiral, alongside Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, and Hale Woodruff. Emma Amos, whose work ranged from graphic, to expressionist, to figurative, has always understood that, as she put it, “to put brush to canvas as a black artist was a political act.”
A dynamic painter and masterful colorist, Emma Amos’s commitment to interrogating the art-historical status quo yielded a body of vibrant and intellectually rigorous work. In each painting presented in RYAN LEE’s booth, Emma Amos uses her own likeness to demonstrate her longstanding interest in making art that reflected the experience of black women, even when such art elicited little to no response from her male peers and critics. Spanning three decades, these works place Amos’s body hurtling through space, donning a likeness of Lucian Freud’s wrinkled white body, clothed in her own hand-woven cloth, mourning a friend, and overlaid with photo transfer images of enslaved children. These works are simultaneously defiant and radiating with anxiety at the black woman artist’s tenuous position in society. Throughout her oeuvre, Emma Amos intentionally painted her figures in a range of skin tones in order to combat the reductive notion of blackness being propagated by a white male-dominated New York art world.
According to critic bell hooks, Emma Amos “moves into history, becoming at each stage of her life artist, subject, more and more a woman of power, decolonized in that no group of people determines and contains her will to paint, to represent. That’s why there’s such a sense of history being made visible in her work.”
Born in Georgia, Emma Amos spent most of her life and career in New York City. In 1959, she was introduced to the vivid gestural lines of Abstract Expressionism while studying at London’s Central School of Art, this early influence remained with the artist throughout her entire career. Further, she had a background in weaving and textile design, and often included fabric elements in her work. The sumptuous and colorful African cloth both grounds the images and reestablishes a connection to one aspect of Emma Amos’s cultural roots.
This is both RYAN LEE Gallery and Emma Amos’s debut exhibition at Frieze London. The landmark paintings on view in the gallery’s booth have never been exhibited anywhere in Europe before. Emma Amos’s works were recently on view in a major retrospective organized by the Georgia Museum of Art, which traveled to the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in late 2021. The retrospective was accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Lisa Farrington, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Laurel Garber, Kay Walkingstick, and Phoebe Wolfskill. Emma Amos’s work was first shown in London in the important exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at Tate Modern.
Emma Amos (b. 1937 Atlanta, GA - d. 2020 Bedford, NH) 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.”
An artist known for pushing technical and thematic boundaries, Emma Amos unabashedly made art that reflected the experience of black women, even when such art elicited little to no response from her male peers and critics. She was profoundly influenced by the civil rights and black movements that pushed for recognition in the art world. Amos became a member of Spiral, an important African American collective in 1964 and joined various underground feminist collectives, including Heresies from 1982 to 1993, and the trailblazing Guerilla Girls group after its founding in 1985. Emma Amos’s vivid and powerful paintings are frequently a celebration of the black body, consistently reminding the viewer, the critic and the art world at large of the undeniably important presence of the black and female body that has so often been overlooked.
Emma Amos graduated from Antioch College in Ohio in 1958 and the Central School of Art in London in 1960. She subsequently moved to New York and became active in the downtown arts scene, working alongside prominent Spiral artists such as Romare Bearden, Hale Woodruff, Norman Lewis, Alvin Hollingsworth and Charles Alston. In 1965, she earned her Masters in Arts from New York University and taught art at the Dalton School in New York. She is a former Professor and Chair in Visual Arts at the Mason Gross School of Art at Rutgers University where she taught for 28 years.
In 2016, Emma Amos received 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.
Emma Amos’ paintings have been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions including the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s (2019); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles’s With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985 (2019); and the Brooklyn Museum’s We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85 (2017). In 2021, the Georgia Museum of Art organized the landmark retrospective Emma Amos: Color Odyssey, which traveled to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Munson Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in New York. This year, Emma Amos is included in Just Above Midtown, 1974 to the Present at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Out on the Streets: Modern Life and Diversity in US Art (1893-1976) at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Brazil, among others.
Her work is held in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art; Bass Museum of Art, Miami; Birmingham Museum of Art; British Museum, London; Bronx Museum of Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum of Art; James F. Byrnes Institute, Stuttgart, Germany; Museo de las Artes, Guadalajara, Mexico; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Minneapolis Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Newark Museum; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, among others.
RYAN LEE Gallery represents Emma Amos since 2016.
RYAN LEE GALLERY
515 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001
Updated 20/10/2022
