BEDFORD, NH.- It is with deep sadness that we share the news of Emma Amos's passing. Amos, a pioneering African-American feminist artist, educator, and activist died in Bedford, NH on May 20, 2020 of natural causes, after a long battle with Alzheimer's Disease. She will be remembered as a dynamic painter and masterful colorist whose commitment to interrogating the art-historical status quo yielded a body of vibrant, sumptuous and intellectually rigorous work.

Amos was born in 1937 in Atlanta, Georgia. She began drawing as a child, attending public schools in the segregated South, and at age sixteen she enrolled in a five-year program at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Amos spent her fourth year abroad, studying printmaking, painting, and weaving at London's Central School of Art. After completing her BA at Antioch, she returned to London, earning a diploma in etching from the Central School in 1959.

Amos's first solo exhibition took place in 1960 at Atlanta's Alexander Gallery. Later that year she moved to New York City to pursue a career as an artist. As a young black woman, Amos faced tremendous obstacles as she attempted to establish herself in the city-obstacles not faced by her white, often male, peers. She was repeatedly turned down for exhibitions and teaching jobs before landing a position as a teaching assistant at the Dalton School, a college preparatory school on Manhattan's Upper East Side. A year later, she went to work with textile designer Dorothy Liebes as a designer and weaver. All the while, Amos maintained her own studio practice, producing primarily paintings and prints, and becoming increasingly attuned to the civil rights and women's liberation movements as they developed around her.

Known for pushing technical and thematic boundaries, Amos unabashedly made art that reflected the experiences of black women, even when such art elicited little or no response from her male peers and critics. In 1964, she began a master's program in Art Education at New York University. It was there that one of her professors, Hale Woodruff, invited her to join a recently formed group of black artists called Spiral. Inspired by the 1963 March on Washington, the group of fifteen African American artists (including Charles Alston, Romare Bearden, and Norman Lewis, along with Woodruff), had come together to discuss the position of black artists in American society, and how art might serve the liberation of consciousness. Spiral remained active between 1963 and 1965; Amos was its youngest-and only female-member.
Before graduating with her MA in 1966, Amos married Robert Amos Levine in 1965; they remained together until he passed away in late 2005. Their son Nicholas was born in 1967, and daughter India followed in 1970. Amos resumed teaching in 1974, when she accepted a position at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts. In 1977 she developed the public television program Show of Hands, a crafts series that she cohosted with Beth Gutcheon. It aired on WGBH Boston for two years. In 1980, Amos joined the faculty at the Mason Gross School of Art, Rutgers University, as an assistant professor. She received tenure in 1992, served as department chair from 2005 to 2007, and continued to teach until her retirement from Rutgers in 2008. Following her retirement from teaching, Amos continued to work in her studio, even as her health began to decline. She moved to an assisted living facility in New Hampshire in 2019.

Throughout her career Amos worked consistently in painting, drawing, printmaking, and weaving, but color and figuration have grounded her work and served as the primary vehicles for her creative and political expression since the 1960s. "Every time I think about color it's a political statement," Amos explained to critic Lucy Lippard in 1991.

It would be a luxury to be white and never have to think about it....The terms used in describing painting have always held a double meaning for me. We're always talking about color, but colors are also skin colors, and the term 'colored' itself-it all means something else to me. You have to choose, as a black artist, what color to make your figures, which I'm very aware of when I paint...I find that I almost never make white people. Butterscotch, brown, or really black-but rarely white.

Amos was profoundly influenced by the civil rights and black arts movements. Even as a member of Spiral, however, she found that the efforts for black representation in the arts often omitted women. Once Spiral ceased activity, she became involved in various feminist collectives, including Heresies from 1982 to 1993. As one of the few black members of the Heresies community, she became a driving force behind the publication of collective's 1982 journal issue examining race and racism within the feminist art movement. Incorporating the experiences of African American women into the movement was paramount for Amos. In 1999 she wrote, 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.

Amos was also a member of the radical feminist art troupe the Guerilla Girls-or, as she described in a 2011 Smithsonian Oral History interview, "I was a member of a very famous clandestine women's group that worked at night and did not ever go out without masks on our faces."

As Amos's own activism and political awareness increased, it was reflected in the dynamism of her paintings. In a 1993 conversation with feminist theorist and cultural critic bell hooks, Amos explained, One of the most important elements in my work is movement... I feel that the static work that I was doing in the sixties had no place once I learned about the women's movement, once I learned about how I was being considered as a black artist. And so when I make a painting, I am trying to use both the expressiveness of the paint flow and the movement of whatever it is I'm using, so that everything is in flux.

This energy is palpable in her paintings from the 1980s and 1990s, which often combine art-historical references with powerful black figures in motion. In 1982 she began incorporating African textiles and her own weaving into her paintings, enhancing their materiality and meaning.

Amos has received a surge in critical attention since 2016, due in part to her inclusion in major travelling exhibitions such as Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (Tate Modern, London; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Broad Museum, CA) and We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965-1985 (Brooklyn Museum, NY; ICA Boston, MA, California African American Museum, Los Angeles).

In 2020, Amos has been included in the exhibitions Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition at the Phillips Collection, With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972-1985, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power is currently on view at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco, and will next travel to the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. Emma Amos: Color Odyssey, a retrospective of Amos's work, will open at the Georgia Museum of Art in 2021 and will travel to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in New York. RYAN LEE Gallery has represented Emma Amos since 2016 and has had four exhibitions of her work. A solo exhibition of Amos's Falling Figures will be held at RYAN LEE in Fall 2020.

Amos is survived by her son Nicholas Amos and daughter-in-law Catherine, her grandchildren, Edward and Madison of Newton, MA; her daughter India Amos of Brooklyn, NY and her brother Larry Amos of Louisville, KY.

The visual and political force of her oeuvre, the multiple analytical registers on which it operates, along with its sheer exuberance will solidify her status among the twentieth century's most aesthetically inventive and intellectually probing artists. Her paintings will continue to inspire new ways of seeing well into the future.

I hope that the subjects of my paintings dislodge, question, and tweak prejudices, rules, and notions relating to art and who makes it, poses for it, shows it, and buys it. The work reflects my investigations into the otherness often seen by white male artists, along with the notion of desire, the dark body versus the white body, racism, and my wish to provoke more thoughtful ways of thinking and seeing.... I also want people to learn to feel my distaste for the notion that there is "art" and "black art." Yes, race, sex, class, and power privileges exist in the world of art. --Emma Amos