Art Gets What It Whats Art Gets Wheat It Desrves
Critic's Pick
The Many Styles of Emma Amos, and Her Drive to Go Gratis
The creative person, who died last yr, used collage and fabric to pause out of painting's confines. At present her works are on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
PHILADELPHIA — Spend a few hours on social media, and you'll come across heated discussions almost who gets to speak for whom. That makes it a good time for an exhibition of art past Emma Amos, a painter, printmaker and weaver who grappled with historic period-quondam questions of identity and authority that feel freshly urgent. "Emma Amos: Color Odyssey," a survey of her work organized by the Georgia Museum of Art and at present on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, comes at an opportune moment.
Still the show is also a lesson near the role that Amos, as a Black female artist, railed against in her life and has been cast in fifty-fifty afterwards her expiry last year. Curated by the Georgia Museum'south Shawnya L. Harris, and in Philadelphia, Laurel Garber, "Colour Odyssey" contains about 60 works. It is an exhilarating survey, simply it is not, every bit Amos deserves, a major retrospective (see: the Jasper Johns mega-exhibition down the hall). Additional space to allow for the inclusion of at to the lowest degree one large-scale projection and a timeline in the galleries would have been a good start.
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The lack feels apparent walking through "Color Odyssey" because the exhibition confirms her brilliance. Amos'south work is rigorous and circuitous, clever and passionate, jam-packed with intellectual and emotional stimulation. She attempted to recast history — art's, the state'due south, her own — from her position every bit a Blackness woman. Amos did not just want a seat at the table; she wanted to remake the table itself.
She began as many U.S. artists did in the 1950s: inspired by then-ascendant Abstract Expressionism. Her showtime solo show, which took place in her hometown, Atlanta, featured abstract etchings. One instance is on view hither, titled "Pompeii (Crimson)" (1959), and its saturation anticipates her forthcoming experiments with colour. The piece accompanies ii other abstractions, including an untitled painting featuring a loosely rendered manus amid insistent passages of black, white and gray. Amos showed this painting in 1965 in the but exhibition mounted by Spiral, an influential but short-lived Black artists' collective; later moving from Atlanta to New York Urban center in 1960, she became the grouping'south youngest fellow member and sole woman. In that same Screw exhibition, she also displayed "Without Plume Boa" (1965), a print of herself wearing blue sunglasses and seemingly zero else.
Prototype
These two radically different artworks hang side by side at the Philadelphia Museum, where they seem to represent a crossroads for their maker: brainchild or figuration, black and white or color? She chose chromatic representation and never looked dorsum, but she didn't surrender her commitment to expressive pigment either.
In fact, i gets the sense that Amos never fully broke with anything, whether a style or medium. Her whole career was an additive procedure of expanding her skills and techniques and then finding ways to combine or complement them. In the 1960s, she worked for a commercial fabric designer and, later on, taught weaving — occupations she kept hidden at first because the art establishment looked downwardly upon them as craftwork.
Amongst the trippy counterculture of the '60s, Amos made a serial of acid paintings with thick blocks and bands of color that seem to act every bit barriers. The female person figures in those beguiling works morph into confident Black women in prints from the 1970s and '80s. The prints are technically complex: Amos would sometimes combine different methods in a unmarried slice or exercise something unusual like cutting her press plate to create a thick white outline around a body. Even if you didn't know the ins and outs of her process, though, the multiple, intricate patterns in a work like "To Sit (With Pochoir)" (1981) are dazzling.
Paradigm
At the aforementioned time, there'southward a conceptual gambit happening here. Many of the figures wear bathing suits, harking back to the bathers motif taken up by modernists like Cezanne and Matisse. Amos replaced the traditionally stylized, nude, white women'southward bodies with contemporary, partly clothed, realistic Black ones, swapping the voyeuristic male gaze with an intimate female one. By doing then, she inserted Black women into art history and claimed the leisure and implied freedom of the water as her own.
The question of liberation — how to get gratuitous — became a driving force in her practise in the belatedly '80s. You can feel it in the third gallery, where her art erupts with new dynamism and energy. Of a sudden, her figures are in motion, whether suspended amid feats of athleticism or falling and floating through the air. The solid ground of reality has given way to expressionistic, metaphorical spaces that might be cosmic, equally in the delightfully chaotic triptych "Flying Circus" (1987), or more expressly political, every bit in "Equals" (1992), which features Amos floating confronting the backdrop of a waving American flag. The flag'south stars have come unmoored, and the blue rectangle that held them has been replaced past a reproduction of a Depression-era photograph of Blackness southern laborers. "Equals" suggests that the just way for African Americans to accomplish equity and justice is to dislodge the existing paradigm of this country, as Malcolm X — whose image repeats forth the height and bottom of the slice — tried to exercise.
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It's non merely subject matter that makes such works so potent. Overcoming her reticence (thank you to a stint co-hosting a PBS Television set evidence nigh arts and crafts in America), Amos began bringing fabric into her fine art, offset her ain weavings and so various kinds of African cloth. She experimented with forming figures from it but ended up using it mostly to accent and frame her paintings, a device that gives them literal texture as well every bit historical depth. Even as she painted her works effectually, with swooping lines and vigorous brushstrokes, she included fabric and hung them like scrolls or tapestries. Incorporating bold, brilliant colors and patterns, she infused her pieces with pleasure while tackling serious topics. Amos scrambled all the categories in which she might have fit: craft and art, women'south and men'due south work, African and Western, grave and fun.
The exhibition includes 2 of her near iconic pieces, "Work Suit" and "Tightrope" (both 1994). Both are wry self-portraits in which Amos borrows imagery from canonical white Western male painters (Lucian Freud and Paul Gauguin, respectively) to annotate on the difficulty of her position as a Black adult female creative person. I had seen them in reproduction only was unprepared for the level of detail and diversity in each i. Amos's best works can concord your attending for a long time, equally your optics and encephalon attempt to unpack their technical and conceptual complexity.
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Writers in the catalog for "Color Odyssey" place her approach as substantially a form of collage; in the 1995 volume "Art on My Mind," the scholar bell hooks calls it a "very postmodern quality" that celebrates mixing and miscegenation. However you define it, for Amos, there was resistance and freedom in heterogeneity — an ability to be her multiple selves at once and an opportunity to rethink the tropes and traps of history.
In "Models" (1995), for example, she lines up ane of Gauguin's depictions of his teenage Tahitian wife, Tehamana; an ethnographic photograph of an African woman with printed text around her; and an epitome of an ancient Greek male nude statue. Bordering them are letters that don't spell out annihilation but allude to knowledge. The trio is a claiming to consider how beauty standards are set, but I read information technology likewise every bit a kind of proposition: If the beginning two have been considered valid objects of study for white men, then the third must exist the aforementioned for Black women. 20-v years agone, Amos posed a question we're still asking at present: Who gets the right to be a subject?
Emma Amos: Color Odyssey
Through Jan. 17 at Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy, Philadelphia. 215-763-8100; philamuseum.org.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/21/arts/design/emma-amos-philadelphia-museum.html
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