Emma Amos: Speed, Movement, Power

My subject is toned bodies and the grace associated with physical prowess. (…) I like the idea of ferocious beasts, birds, snakes, dogs, ball players and trained bodies taking care of business in MY SPACE. Drawn to the arena of walls, and shared intimacy by MY textures and brush strokes. Held together by MY imagination, setting records and scrambling for the kill on MY rag trade wall.

— Emma Amos, in the exhibition catalogue for Celebration: Eight Afro-American Artists Selected by Romare Bearden at the Henry Street Settlement, 1984

In 1980, Emma Amos started innovating new technical and thematic modes of representing strength after becoming a professor (and later chair) at the Mason Gross School of Art at Rutgers University. Particularly inspired by the physical and cultural power of the Black athlete, Amos began combing magazines for images of Black sportsmen being, in the artist’s words, “powerful as they played games that showed their great physical prowess.” An artist consistently reflective of the zeitgeist, Amos planned many of her resulting athlete works while watching the 1984 and 1988 Olympics on TV. Unafraid to tease technical frontiers in her pursuit of new thematic ones, Amos brought together printmaking, pastel, weaving, and photo transfer in these landmark works on paper. Particularly sensitive to how, in her words, Black athletes are “lionized” for their skills, and later “discarded as injured or aging,” Amos often employs wild animals as pictorial foils in her athletic portraits.

I switched from my seated women of 1979-80 to painting male athletes in 1983-84 because l wanted to steal “male power,” (…) I wanted action so I did men and equated their energy with the actions of fast, impressive animals. I also wanted to make a statement about my feeling that wild animals like the big cats are admired, used, abused, discarded, their habitats overrun and confiscated in the same way that black basketball, baseball, and football players are used and then discarded, only a few going on to make the career-long big bucks. Later I said, hey, women are runners, too, and women are also powerful, and I started doing the women athletes.

– Emma Amos in interview with Mildred Thompson, 1995