Emma Amos

"Making public art is a collaborative act, like making good theater. Even before the artist is chosen, the architects and engineers design, build, and construct. The artist, with the public as audience, and other artists and artisans in the wings, makes a production that must please even the group of wary producers (the administrators) who bet on its being a hit. With public art we hope the applause lasts forever…"

Blurring the distinction between "high" and "low" art, Emma Amos’s explorations in different media—etching, monoprints, silk collagraphs, photography, painting, fibre, sewing—result in seamless works of art. Amos incorporates fibres and printed cloths which, when combined with gestural strokes of paint, create fields of color and texture that enmesh drawn and painted figures and photographic images. In her paintings, she exploits the tensions between photographic and painted illusion. She has always found photography "interesting because it seems not to lie when in fact it does—it’s very selective about what it shows." Moreover, bordering her paintings with African fabrics, Amos sews, appliques, embroiders and occasionally quilts with her own weavings, Kente cloth and batiks. Her large canvases hang unstretched, evoking, at once, the form of European prestige tapestries and the African diaspora…

Equals’

Bill T. Jones