The Artsy Vanguard 2020
Isis Davis-Marks, Artsy
September 2020
The Black women in Emma Amos’s works have agency: Diverging from their art-historical forebears, they don’t just lie passively on chaise lounges, but rather, they act. They incite important discussions of racism, sexism, and colonialism. In the 1994 painting Tightrope, for example, Amos depicted herself on a high wire, balancing precariously while holding up a T-shirt emblazoned with the likeness of Teha’amana, Paul Gauguin s teenage Tahitian mistress—drawing attention to the much-lauded artist’s colonialist and predatory practice. […]