Emma Amos (1937 – 2020)
News Desk, Artforum
May 2020
Emma Amos, a pioneering artist best-known for her vivid figurative paintings exploring gender, race, and power through an inventive approach to color and form, has died at age eighty-three. The cause was Alzheimer’s disease, according to a statement by New York’s Ryan Lee Gallery, which represents the artist. Over a nearly six-decade career that encompassed both figurative and abstract painting as well as printmaking and weaving, Amos drew from art history, current affairs, and her own life, helping fill the representational void surrounding African American identity and heritage in art institutions and beyond. Influenced by Abstract Expressionism and the civil rights movement, Amos began painting in the early 1960s and, in 1963, became the sole female member of Spiral, a short-lived but momentous group of African American artists in New York City who explored the role of blackness in art. […]