Emma Amos (painter)

Amos' work was included in the 2022 exhibition Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

Amos died of complications of Alzheimer's disease on May 20, 2020 at the age of 83. In 2021, Emma Amos: Color Odyssey, a retrospective of her work organized by Shawnya Harris, opened at Georgia Museum of Art before traveling.

Amos retired from teaching in 2008 and made a point to visit her students' exhibitions to support them. Her works in the 2017 Soul of a Nation Tate show inspired a collection from designer Duro Olowu.

Her piece Measuring Measuring (1995) was used as the front cover image for the African American women artists historical text, Creating Their Own Image: The History of the African American Women Artists by Lisa E. Farrington.

Amos admitted that being from the South, as an African American woman, she had always been aware of the adversities she faced in her everyday life. However, in relation to Feminism, Amos did not become actively involved until the late 1980s. Before this time, in the early 1970s, while raising children, Amos was invited to join a Feminist Group of artists that met in New York City parks. When choosing whether or not to attend, Amos stated, "From what I heard of feminist discussions in the park, the experiences of black women of any class were left out. I came from a line of working women who were not only mothers, but breadwinners, cultured, educated, and who had been treated as equals by their black husbands. I felt I could not afford to spend precious time away from studio and family to listen to stories so far removed from my own."

It was not until the early 1980s, after she began teaching at Mason Gross of Arts at Rutgers University in New Jersey where she decided to participate in the feminist group Heresies. Within this group, women worked together, from all backgrounds, to publish pieces of artwork and writing of unknown women artists, published in a series of magazines and discussions. When speaking on the group, she declared, "And that’s what Heresies became for me. All of my disdain for white feminists disappeared, because we were all in the same boat. We just came to the boat from different spaces." She edited the collective's journal Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics.

Amos originated and co-hosted Show of Hands, a crafts show for WGBH-TV in Boston in 1977–79, and later became a Professor at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.

In New York, Amos joined the printmaking studios of Letterio Calapai (a part of Stanley William Hayter's Paris Atelier 17) and Robert Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop. Despite the difficulty African Americans face in entering the art scene, as there is often a lack of access to dealers and curators, Amos persevered and received her M.A. from New York University in 1966. While at NYU, she became reacquainted with Hale Woodruff, who was a professor there at the time.

Amos felt that joining Spiral would be useful because she did not know many artists in New York at the time. Amos worked full-time as a designer during the day, and studied full-time in the evenings, and made time to paint on the weekends. In May 1965, Spiral rented a gallery space at 147 Christopher Street, where the group had their first and only exhibit. Amos displayed an etching entitled Without a Feather Boa, which has since been lost. This etching was a nude self-portrait bust that depicted Amos "staring indifferently at the viewer from behind a pair of dark sunglasses." Prior to Spiral, Amos was resistant towards the idea of "black art" and galleries that only showed work by African Americans, but she came to understand that these were often the only options available to black artists at the time, and also learned how to integrate race and sex politics into her work without her work becoming dominated by the process of political engagement.

Spiral stopped meeting shortly after 1965, when rising rent prices lost them their gallery and meeting space on the Lower East Side. During the 1970s, Amos went on to teach textile design at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts, weaving on her own looms at Threadbare, a yarn and weaving shop on Bleecker Street and thrived as a weaver due to the propagation of weaving and fabric art within the Feminist Art Movement.

At the age of 23, Amos had a meeting with Woodruff for a critique of her prints, and he told her about Spiral. The group was a collective of approximately fifteen prominent African American artists, founded in 1963 by Romare Bearden, Charles Alston, Norman Lewis, and Hale Woodruff. The group was interested in discussions of Négritude, a philosophy born out of opposition to French colonialism and centered around encouraging a common racial identity for black Africans around the world. Spiral was formed out of the Works Progress Administration and the Harlem Renaissance. Woodruff took some of her work to one of their meetings at their rented storefront, and the members of the group liked her work enough to invite her to join as their first and only female member. Amos thought it strange that no other women artists were asked to join the group, even though they were acquainted with the members of Spiral.

Emma Amos was also a member of the anonymous feminist group Guerilla Girls and used the pseudonym Zora Neale Hurston. Amos was also briefly involved with A.I.R. or Artists in Residency Gallery, known for being the first artist-run gallery for women in the United States of America. For numerous years, Amos also attended meetings with the group, Fantastic Women in the Arts. This group also explored the artwork and writings of many female artists, but also focused on how the revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, concerning education on racism and sexism, failed to actually make any difference for black Americans or women. It is in this group that Amos discussed the privilege of white Americans, and how that was evident in the arts in everyday life. Amos stayed active in her involvement in these issues and providing education to younger generations, however, keeping groups going seemed to her to be the hardest challenge. Amos felt that "artists who are not white, young, and straight, and who are openly political, and feminist, seem to still be on the margins. [She] hope[s] we all will see more change soon."

Amos studied at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, at the Central School of Art and Design in London and at New York University. While at Antioch, Amos worked for half of the year, and studied for the remainder. She worked in Chicago, New York, and in Washington, D.C., which enabled her to visit galleries and museums, which had been less accessible in Atlanta. Her fourth year at Antioch, she went to England and studied at the London Central School of Art, where she learned to print and etch under Anthony Harrison, and began to paint with oils, which she had not done before. Amos received her BFA degree from Antioch in 1958, then went back to London for her degree in etching, which she received in 1959 after two years of study. The following year Amos moved to New York City to start working with two printmaking studios. Later on she received her MA at New York University (NYU).

Emma Amos (16 March 1937 – 20 May 2020) was a postmodern African-American painter and printmaker.

Amos was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1937 to India DeLaine Amos and Miles Green Amos. She also has an older brother named Larry. Amos took an interest in art at an early age, creating "masses of paper dolls" and learning figure drawing from issues of Esquire and the art of Alberto Vargas, was painting the figure by the age of nine. Her mother had aspirations of Amos studying with Hale Woodruff, but he did not accept many private students and left the area before she had the opportunity to study with him.