Emma Amos at the Studio Museum in Harlem - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Like the story quilts of Faith Ringgold, the novels of Alice Walker or the music of Bessie Smith, the brilliantly colored paintings and fabric collages of Emma Amos bring a premium on feminist Afrocentric sources of knowledge and inspiration. Her first retrospective, titled "Emma Amos: Prints and Paintings, 1982-1992" consisted of 24 paintings and 23 works upon paper and was accompanied by dint of a catalogue with essays by dint of bell hooks, Valerie Mercer and curator Thalia Gouma-Peterson.

Working as a rug and textile designer and weaver in novel York from the early '60 end the '70s, the Atlanta-born artist abandoned painting in 1964 and studied lithography with move with a jerk Blackburn at New York University, where she received her M.A. in 1966 During the '60 Amos exhibited her lithographs and silk-screen prints as the alone woman member of Spiral, a cluster of African-American painters that included Romare Bearden, Hale Woodruff and Norman Lewis. When Amos get backed to painting in the late '70 she combined social commentary with folklore and family history upon canvases she sewed together from strips of linen. Her works from the period overlayed by this exhibition, among them on the outside in Front (1982) and racers with Cheetah and Black Dog sky-coloreds (both 1983), are banner-sized, celebratory fabric collages of athletic African-Americans, for the most part women, dancing, running and diving.

Beginning in 1987 her figures are no longer soiled but flying or, most repeatedly falling. The triptych Flying Circus (1987) a large painting bordered with strips of colorful African textiles, depicts three women and a man falling end the night sky above a coliseum and a cathedral. sum of two units galloping white horses, a ladder, a cheetah and a lyre-bearing Orpheus fall with them, like space debris. in Amos's paintings, civilizations appear in disarray, while falling appear to bes a metaphor for anxiety and dislocation. Like abundant of Amos's recent work, this triptych have the appearances to chart moments of the artist's alienation from one as well as the other black and white worlds.

Amos best exercises her gift for converting introspection into racial commentary in 10 large prints upon rice paper from her 1988 "Odyssey" series. A visually sophisticated narrative in photographs and drawings, "Odyssey" is an homage to her family, friends and heroes. Georgia Pharmacists honors her grandfather, who in 1914 became the first licensed black pharmacist in Georgia. The series extreme points with Freedom March, which depicts Amos leaving her hometown, running, in 1961 The halls of justice and Muhammad Ali, that icon of black masculinity, hover through the air behind her.

To drive residence her fellowship with a large community of women in 1991 Amos painted a series of 44 portraits depicting art-world friends, including artists Joyce Kozloff Miriam Shapiro and Lorna Simpson, curators Holly fill up and Martha Wilson and critic Lucy Lippard. Amos's work embraces one as well as the other emotion and intellect; her meshing of turn of expression and testimony evolves out of her search for constructive definitions of women and African-Americans.

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