Emma Amos, feminism, friendship & an artist's greatest resource
“It's always been my contention that for me, a Black woman artist, to walk into the studio is a political act." —Emma Amos
In 1968, when Emma Amos was just 30 years old, she was interviewed by Al Murray for the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. She had been in New York fewer than ten years by way of a middle-class Atlanta childhood, Antioch College, London’s Central School of Art, and NYU. At this point in her career she had worked for the important textile designer, Dorothy Liebes, and was admired as a printmaker and weaver. But Amos had sold only one painting, she said, her studio was full of paintings she was considering trashing, and she struggled to find gallery representation:
“I’ve never shown my paintings anywhere. I got brave about three summers ago and I took slides of everything and I marched around after all the galleries had closed. It was the dumbest thing I could do. And I got discouraged going to these places. Everybody looked at my things, which I thought were very good, and they said, well, you know, we can’t use it. And I can remember Bertha Schaefer, before she even looked – she never even saw what I had – she just looked at me and said, ‘I don’t care who you are or what you are I’m booked up for the year.’ I slunk out, having waited for about forty-five minutes to see her. It was altogether all the bad things you hear about trying to find a gallery. I’ll never do it again. I will never take my things around. Because it’s too crushing and it’s too hard on you and you don’t paint after that. You just stop. No matter where you were, if you were in the middle of a painting you just [can’t] go on because you wonder what [you’re] doing it for. You know, you can’t sell if you don’t have a gallery and it just stops you cold. It’s terrible.”
Early in her career, Emma Amos had a touch of lone artist syndrome. (She was also a mother to two young children.) She knew there were other Black women artists, people like Faith Ringgold and Vivian Browne, but they weren’t her friends, not yet. In 1964, Amos was the first and only woman invited to join Spiral, a group of fifteen Black male artists. She thought it was “fishy” they hadn’t asked a more established artist like Ringgold or Browne. “I probably seemed less threatening to their egos,” she wrote in a 1999 article in Art Journal, “as I was not yet of much consequence.”
It would be another decade before Amos would become, as bell hooks put it, “a powerhouse in terms of bringing women artists together.”
In the early 1970s, when her children were toddlers, she stayed away from “the Village artists/NYU park-sitting mothers.”
“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 sat out feminist politics until the early 1980s, when the writer Lucy R. Lippard urged her to join the Heresies Collective and contribute to its journal. With Heresies, Amos found “the group I had always hoped existed: serious, knowledgeable, take-care-of-business feminists giving time to publish the art and writings of women.”
In a 1982 issue of Heresies, Amos would offer the antidote to the lone artist’s gutting gallery experience in “Some Do’s and Don’ts for Black Women Artists”:
“DON’T take your art to Soho or 57th Street without Alex Katz’s written introduction. Soho/57th Street doesn’t dig blackass art.”
There is an important lesson here in self-preservation. Also that a creative career for oneself is founded on relationships with others. But not just any group, the right group:
“DO exhibit with people whose work you like and in which you find similarities to your own. There’s nothing intrinsically good about being a loner; finding parallels won’t make you a ‘groupie.’
DO be supportive of all your artist friends. Your peers are the people who see your work as it’s happening. They give you feedback and keep you going.”
She ends the piece with a “Do praise” list that includes Lena Horne, Tina Turner, Toni Morrison, and Maya Angelou.
“DO be thankful and shout ‘Hallelujah!’”
In October, I bundled up on a farm in Wisconsin with a group of women, old friends and new, all artists. Annie asked if I’d like her to read my tarot cards. She held her Hollow Valley tarot deck like a holy object. We shuffled the cards together and I laid out two. Annie read from the tarot guide and we talked and riffed on the themes. I felt my energies rise, and animated threads spun between us, and of course I wept.
Later, I looked at the cards again, hoping to commit some of my previous insights into writing. But as I consulted the guide, the light had gone out. Annie had read these words aloud, but they were devoid of whatever magic had enlivened our reading. The reading was, I realized, like the best therapy or the most dynamic learning environments: the meaning is co-created. It doesn’t come from me or you or the text but through the inter-weaving of each present component: ideas, thoughts, associations, and connections. From two overlaid finger prints, a new pattern appears.
Emma Amos was a weaver, though she understood how to deploy a skill and when to underplay it.
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