In her own image: The radical practice of Emma Amos
Deeksha Nath, stirworld
July 2025
Last seen in London in 2017 at Tate Modern’s exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, pioneering African American artist Emma Amos’ (1937 - 2020) exhibition at Alison Jacques gallery in London is a long-overdue celebration of one of the most dynamic and quietly radical figures in American art. Spanning five decades of her practice, the show offers a sweeping, richly layered view of an artist who remained steadfastly committed to the human figure, to experimental colour and composition, and to quiet but insistent political engagement. Born in 1937 in Atlanta, Georgia, Amos studied at Antioch College in Ohio and later at the Central School of Art in London. Returning to the United States in the early 1960s, she settled in New York, where she would become the youngest and only female member of Spiral, a collective of African American artists—among them Romare Bearden, Charles Alston and Hale Woodruff—formed to respond to the Civil Rights movement through visual expression. […]