How Emma Amos’s Art and Activism Powerfully Confronted Racism and Sexism
Maximilíano Durón, ARTnews
April 2021
Over the course of a career that spanned more than half a century, Emma Amos profoundly shifted the course of art history through her varied experiments combining painting and textiles. These works exploded with color, and they brought forth new mediations on what figurative painting could be, reckoning in the process with issues of race and gender. “I try to make a painting resonate in some kind of way,” Amos said in an oral history with the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in 2011.
The influence of Amos, who died last year at 83, now looms large in the art world, but that wasn’t always the case. She struggled to find gallery representation early on in her career, and for much of her life, she didn’t sell many works. Even fewer of her paintings entered museum collections while she was alive. But Amos was never one to give up easily. She used her art to ponder her anxieties about being erased from a canon of which she wanted to be a part, and she joined collectives like Spiral, Heresies, and the Guerrilla Girls, which called out racism and sexism in the art world. […]