Emma Amos: Art Matters

Emma Amos, born in Atlanta, Georgia, always knew she would be an artist rather than the homemaker and businesswoman her mother had been. After graduating from Ohio's Antioch College and the Central School of Art in London, she moved to New York and began to make prints at Letterio Calapai's branch of the Paris Atelier 17. Beginning with her time at Calapai's, Amos began to meet more established artists, including Norman Lewis, William King, Richard Florsheim, and Doris Nash, who introduced her to the print dealer, Sylvan Cole, who began to sell her prints. A year later she began work as a designer/weaver for the master textile designer Dorothy Liebes, found a downtown studio, and began to paint again and to make prints at Robert Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop. Still in the early 1960's Amos began working towards a Masters degree at New York University where she met Hale Woodruff, her childhood hero, famous to her for his Atlanta University murals. Woodruff showed Amos's work to The Spiral (a group of black artists who had established their careers in the 1940s and 50s) which included Woodruff, Charles Alston, Norman Lewis, and Romare Bearden. After seeing the color etchings she had made in London and in New York this group invited her to join and she became the only woman and youngest member. Eventually she co-hosted a television show that blended fine arts and crafts for WGBH Educational Television in Massachusetts in 1977-78. Shortly thereafter she became Professor of Art at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, teaching drawing and painting.1 ART MATTERS Beauty, i n k e d p l a t e s o n v e l v e t , A f r i c a n f a b r i c b o r d e r s , 6 3 . 2 5 " x 2 5 . 5 " , 2 0 0 1 p h o t o g r a p h b y B e c k e t L o g a n SHARON PATTON B lurring and redefining categories o f art and craft, Emma A mos explores her pictorial world in painting, drawing and prints that include an array o f techniques and media - photography , sewing, textiles, weaving, applique, and collage, papermaking and other techniques. A mos exploits the tensions between photographic and painted, drawn or printed illusion. Her efforts to use a mix o f intense color, expressionist brushwork , impasto and thin paint, controlled or sometimes thrown paint, her own and discarded family photographs, flat color and collage result in seamless works o f art. Large scaled works that have the now-familiar embroidered or printed titles set in African fabric borders (through which rods are threaded) evoke European tapestries or Fon and Fante (West Africa) applique banners. Amos's prints are technically extraordinary. She dissolves the distinctions between media. Years ago printmakers discovered that they could release colored inks from xeroxed photographs or drawings and A mos, while teaching this technique at Rutgers, discovered other ways to get photographic images onto paper and canvas. Ever anxious to make printmaking more painterly and less wed to toxic acids and solvents, in the early 1980s A mos learned from the sculptor Terry Adkins about the techniques o f painting acrylic mediums on silk as a block-out in platemaking. His brief description led to the large body o f works on paper A mos has made using the inventive aid and intelligence o f master-printer Kathy Caraccio, with w hom A mos has worked for over twenty years. Those silk collagraphs and the latest A mos-cut plastic stencils, inked and printed on velvets and rugs by Caraccio's press, are the basis o f a broad range o f innovative editions, monoprints, photographs and drawings that add to Amos's painted oeuvre. F a l l / W i n t e r 2002 N k a - 4 1 The objective for Emma Amos is to argue constructively against norms in the field of art as well as society. She ably uses her paintings and prints...