Emma Amos: Sports

My subject is toned bodies and the grace associated with physical prowess. My works of athletes, dancers and animals begin with sketches and drawings of “moves’ and “plays,” the energy of chasing, performing and competing.

(…)

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 her artist statement for her work Kicks, in the exhibition catalogue for Celebration: Eight Afro-American Artists Selected by Romare Bearden at the Henry Street Settlement, 1984

Emma Amos Tackle- Rhinos (diptych), 1983 Pastel 30 x 44 1/2 inches (76.2 x 113 cm) each

Emma Amos
Tackle- Rhinos, 1983
Pastel (diptych)
30 x 44 1/2 inches (76.2 x 113 cm) each

In 1980, Emma Amos started innovating new technical and thematic modes of representing strength after an empowering teaching appointment 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. She was unafraid to tease technical frontiers in her pursuit of new thematic ones, marrying printmaking, pastel, weaving, and photo transfer in these landmark works on paper.

Emma Amos
Flat Out, 1983
Pastel
30 x 45 inches (76.2 x 114.3 cm)

Emma Amos
Tackle- Rhinos (detail), 1983

Particularly sensitive to how, in her words, Black athletes are “lionized” for their skills and then “discarded as injured or aging,” Amos often employs wild animals as pictorial foils in her athletic portraits.

Marrying etching with unique relief plates and photo transfer at Bob Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop, Amos pictures basketball hero Julius Erving, also known as Dr. J; dancers forming cat eyes with their raised arms; defensive football players charging after roaring lions; and offensive football players dodging twisting snakes.

Emma Amos is multi-talented, working as a painter, printmaker and weaver. Her figurative approach combines fluent stylization and a setting for her figures and shapes in rather flat, lightly modeled planes of bright colors.

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

Emma Amos
Kicks, c. 1983
Etching with unique relief plates and photo transfer (20 individually titled prints)
Paper Dimensions: 11 1/2 x 11 1/2 inches (29.2 x 29.2 cm) each
Framed Dimensions: 12 3/4 x 12 3/4 x 1 1/4 inches (32.4 x 32.4 x 3.2 cm)
Edition of 10

Emma Amos
The Triple–Carl Lewis, 1983
Etching with monoprint, chine colle and pastel, in three parts
41 x 30 inches (104.1 x 76.2 cm)

Emma Amos: Sports

Emma Amos
On Top of the World, 1996
Silk collagraph with African fabric borders
30 x 22 inches (76.2 x 55.9 cm)
Edition variant of 60

Amos’s striking body of works on paper depicting Black—particularly Olympian—athletes culminates in her mixed-media self-portrait, On Top of the World, commissioned by the Atlantic Corporation during the 1996 Olympic Games.

Emma Amos: Sports

Emma Amos
Warm Up 1, 2008
Monoprint with shaped handmade paper and fabric collage
48 x 31 1/2 inches (121.9 x 80 cm)

Emma Amos: Sports

Emma Amos
Warm Up 5, 2008
Monoprint with shaped handmade paper and fabric collage
48 x 31 1/2 inches (121.9 x 80 cm)

Encouraged and stimulated by a teaching appointment at Rutgers University in 1980, Amos felt empowered and looked for new images of strength. She combed the sports pages for images of black men “being powerful as they played games that showed their great physical prowess” She painted these athletes in acrylic on linen canvas but continued to add to the paintings pieces of her weaving. Keenly aware of the temporary and ambivalent nature of the black athletes’ power, she paralleled their images with those of wild animals such as alligators and mountain gorillas.

—Thalia Gouma-Peterson, in the College of Wooster Art Museum’s exhibition catalogue for Emma Amos: Paintings and Prints 1982-1992, 1993

Emma Amos: Sports

Emma Amos
Zeus, c. 1984
Monoprint with pochoir
41 1/2 x 29 1/2 inches (105.4 x 74.9 cm)

Emma Amos: Sports

Emma Amos
Water Series (Diver, Indigo Fish, Man), 1987
Silk collagraph with glitter (set of 3)
46 x 31 1/2 inches (116.8 x 80 cm) each
Edition size varies

Emma Amos: Sports

Emma Amos
Untitled (Runners), c. 1985
Pulp painting on handmade paper with fabric, eight part collage
54 1/2 x 43 inches (138.4 x 109.2 cm)