“

I want to do the human figure, and I want to invent the human figure.

— EMMA AMOS

Emma Amos was an American painter, printmaker, and weaver whose five-decade career confronted questions of race, gender, and the body in American art. Born in Atlanta and trained in London and New York, she became the youngest member — and only woman — of Spiral, the pioneering collective of Black artists formed in 1963 to grapple with the role of art during the Civil Rights movement.

Amos's paintings often incorporated hand-woven fabric borders, photo-transferred imagery, and African textiles, appropriating and reworking canonical art-historical compositions to insert Black bodies — often her own — into a history that had excluded them. She was an active member of the feminist collective Heresies and taught for over two decades at Rutgers University.

Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the National Gallery of Art, among others. Amos continued to paint and exhibit until her death in 2020.