The Best of 2021: Our Top 10 United States Art Shows
Ilene Dube, Hyperallergic
December 2021
Emma Amos is having a moment, albeit posthumously. The only woman and youngest person to be invited to join Spiral, a New York-based collective of African American artists active in the 1960s and ’70s, Amos joins the pantheon of octogenarian and nonagenarian women finally getting retrospectives in major museums. Amos, who died last year, was a professor at the Mason Gross School of Art, Rutgers University, when it was a hotbed of the feminist art movement, a movement she actively participated in. Among the highlights of Emma Amos: Color Odyssey, which originated at the Georgia Museum of Art and was curated by Laurel Garber and Shawnya L. Harris, is “Tightrope” (1994), which employs Amos’s signature technique of African textile borders. The artist paints herself in a Wonder Woman costume that peeks out from her painter’s smock, her balancing on the tightrope suggestive of the struggles Amos faced as an artist without the privileges afforded to White masculinity. […]