Look Closely: Emma Amos and the Perfect Print
Laurel Garber, PMA Stories
December 2021
The first thing to know about Emma Amos’s remarkable print American Girl is that things are not what they seem. In this apparently straightforward image of a reclining figure gazing out toward the viewer, Amos and the printers at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop pushed the medium of etching to its limit. Above all, Amos’s American Girl defies the flatness that we typically associate with works on paper: it relies on a number of intricate techniques at different stages of the production process that give the final print various, multidimensional layers.
One of the emphases of the exhibition Emma Amos: Color Odyssey on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (through January 17, 2022) is the artist’s career-long practice of experimental printmaking. Amos began making etchings in the late 1950s as a young student in London and continued to make prints for the next six decades. Color Odyssey includes examples of her prints from across these years and explores the ways she used print as a medium for her investigations into the representation of the female figure. […]