Blog includes online exhibitions and articles related to COVID - 19 and the social issues encountered by Artists of Color.
Tuesday, September 8, 2020
Emma Amos. Joel Elgin. Athraigh Printmaking Studio
Printmaking/Art History. Black Printmakers/Artists: Emma Amos.
In August of 1963, The March on Washington was held to advocate for the civil rights of African Americans. Martin Luther King Jr delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech, calling for an end to racism.
The art collective, The Spiral Group formed as a result of the march.
“…Spiral was a New York–based collective of African-American artists that came together in the 1960s to discuss their relationship to the civil rights movement and the shifting landscape of American art, culture and politics…”
An artist in the group who I particularly admire is Emma Amos.
Emma Amos (1937 – 2020) was invited in 1963, by her professor, “…Hale Woodruff to become a member of Spiral, a group of black artists that included Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, and Charles Alston. She was the group’s youngest and only female member…”
Prints and paintings by Emma Amos are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum of Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Brooklyn Museum. Emma Amos died on May 21 at her home in Bedford, N.H. She was 83. In 2021, a retrospective of the artist’s work will open in her home state, at the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens.
Stars and Stripes,
monotype with George Shivery photo transfer, 1995
About Whiteness (Red)
oil and laser transfer on paper. 1995
Measuring, Measuring
Acrylic on linen canvas, Kente fragment, batiked hand swatches, African strip woven borders, and laser-transfer photographs, 1995
Mississippi Wagon, 1937,
print, 1992
My Mothers, My Sisters,
lithograph, handmade paper collage, African fabric border, 1992
Contemporary African American artists continue the work of Spiral:
Black Art In America
SPIRAL NOW 55 Years Later: New Artists, Familiar Struggle
