Eliana Willis

The artist Emma Amos died in May, at age 83, from complications of Alzheimer’s Disease. But even as her illness progressed, the painter, printmaker, and weaver was sustained by the knowledge that her seven-decade career was finally on the brink of her first retrospective, “Color Odyssey” at the Georgia Museum of Art.
“Emma always knew that she was going to have a show with me—she might not have remembered my name at the last, but she knew that I was organizing an exhibition,” Shawnya Harris, the museum’s curator of African American and African diasporic art, told Artnet News. “That really touched me.”
A pioneering African American artist, educator, and activist born in Atlanta, Georgia, Amos studied visual art at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and London’s Central School of Art, before getting her master’s in art education at New York University.
It was there that her professor and mentor, Hale Woodruff, invited her to join the short-lived yet groundbreaking Black art collective Spiral, alongside the likes of Romare Bearden and Charles Alston. Amos was its youngest member and the only woman. As an artist dedicated to making work that spoke to the experiences of Black women, Amos went on to join the feminist collectives Heresies and the Guerrilla Girls.
Emma Amos, Equals (1992). Courtesy of a private collection.

“Her involvement with these groups show the conviction she had not just as an artist but also as a person who wanted to fight for injustice,” Jeffrey Lee, of New York’s Ryan Lee Gallery, told Artnet News in an email.
“There are so many aspects to Emma,” Harris added. “She was entangled with some really formative parts of the art-historical narrative, around feminism, around Civil Rights, around Pattern and Decoration.”
The curator met Amos in 2009, and was immediately interested in organizing an exhibition. When Harris joined the Georgia Art Museum in 2015, Amos was near the top of her wish list for shows, both because she was a local artist and by virtue of her work, which addresses issues such as race, class, gender, and privilege in figurative mixed-media paintings that combine lithography, intaglio, collage, and laser transfer.
“The way she depicted the human form and the process of mixing painting and fabric by introducing an element of craft all resonate today,” Lee said.
Emma Amos, Have Faith (1991). Courtesy of the collection of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University; acquired through the Truman W. Eustis III, Class of 1951, Fund, and through the generosity of the Class of 1951, 2017. Image courtesy of the Johnson Museum.

But despite her prolific, multifaceted career, Amos—like so many Black women artists—remained largely unrecognized  for much of her career.
Her last solo museum show wrapped up its tour at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1995, and it has only been in recent years that Amos began appearing in important traveling group shows, such as “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” originating at the Tate Modern in London, and “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965–1985,” organized by the Brooklyn Museum. Both were in 2017.
“It just has taken longer to get women and artists of color into the forefront,” Harris said. “It’s a very phallocentric art world.”
It was an issue that Amos addressed herself in an artist statement that proclaimed, “yes, race, sex, class, and power privileges exist in the world of art.”
Emma Amos, X-Flag (1992). Courtesy of a private collection.

“In some of her writings,” Harris said, “Amos talks about not being able to be a part of the literature or the criticism of art. It hampers the development of women artists’ careers if nobody’s writing about them.”
In giving Amos the spotlight she has long deserved, the Georgia Museum has brought together more than 60 of the artists’ works, from all stages of her career.
Seeing it all laid out chronologically, the viewer will realize how, early on, Amos began incorporating the African textiles and other fabrics that characterize her later work, and how her use of color remains a through line as she moves from the abstract works of her Spiral period to figurative compositions.
“She used color from a political standpoint to make statements about social relationships and culture,” Harris said. “There is no one representation that embodies all of Blackness or anything else. That’s why you see all these women with multicolored body parts in her work.”
Emma Amos, Does Black Rub Off? (1992). Courtesy of the Morris Museum of Art, Georgia.

“It’s always been my contention,” Amos once said, “that for me, a Black woman artist, to walk into the studio is a political act.”
“Emma was concerned about her legacy,” Lee said. “Now, we can rest assured her legacy will continue on forever. She is part of art history and the canon, and is being recognized for all that she did during her lifetime.”
See more works from the show below.
Emma Amos, 3 Ladies (1970). Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, purchased with the John D. McIlhenny Fund, 2019.

Emma Amos, Creatures of the Night (1985). Collection of the Amos family, courtesy Ryan Lee Gallery, New York.

Emma Amos, Creatures of the Night (1985). Collection of the Amos family, courtesy Ryan Lee Gallery, New York.

Emma Amos, Streaks (1983). Courtesy of a private collection.

Emma Amos, Identity (2006). Collection of the Amos family, courtesy Ryan Lee Gallery, New York.

Emma Amos, Take One (1985–87). Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art; gift of Sylvan Cole, in memory of Lillyan Cole.

Emma Amos, Sandy and Her Husband (1973). Courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art; John L. Severance Fund, 2018.

Emma Amos, Tightrope (1994). Courtesy of the Minneapolis Institute of Art gift of funds from Mary and Bob Mersky and the Ted and Dr. Roberta Mann Foundation Endowment Fund.

Emma Amos, Seated Figure and Nude (1966). Courtesy of the Emanuel Family Collection.

Emma Amos, American Girl (1974). Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 2018.

“Emma Amos: Color Odyssey” is on view at the Georgia Museum of Art, 90 Carlton Street, Athens, Georgia, January 30—April 25, 2021. It will travel to the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, 310 Genesee Street, Utica, New York, June 19–September 12, 2021; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, October 9, 2021–January 2, 2022.

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For the artist Abigail DeVille, watching Black Lives Matter marches over the past summer was pivotal. She recalls the throngs of protesters, arms linked, eyes staring straight amid a full on pandemic.
Those images, seared in her memory, prompted the creation of her sculpture, Light of Freedom (2020), commissioned by the Madison Square Park Conservancy and installed in the Manhattan-based park. The work takes the ubiquitous image of Lady Liberty’s torch and infuses it with contemporary symbolism. The work incorporates scaffolding as a sort of golden cage, in which a torch is suspended. The fiery blue flames of the object are in fact entwined mannequin arms pointing into the distance.
In an exclusive interview with Art21 as part of the “Extended Play” series, the artist spoke about her influences, and the symbolism embedded in the work.
A native New Yorker whose work reflects on the city’s history, DeVille used scaffolding both for its ubiquity in New York and for what it represents.
“Things have always been constructed and torn down,” she says. “This idea of freedom is under continual construction—and reconstruction—from generation to generation.” 
Deville was inspired by an elementary school teacher who introduced her to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which she said “planted a seed, for sure, of thinking about how we’re all participants within history.”

Installation view, Abigail DeVille’s Light of Freedom (2020). Photo: Andy Romer Photography. Courtesy of the Madison Square Park Conservancy.

The artist references a 19th-century image she saw in which the hand and torch of the Statue of Liberty were on display in Madison Square Park in a fundraising effort to build its pedestal.
“Society has tried to separate us or define us by our bodies,” DeVille says. But the sculpture and its interlocking limbs are a symbol of the power of joining together “collectively… [to] assert something else.” 
Light of Freedom (2020) will travel to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, in March, and to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, in October.
Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s series Extended Play, below. The brand new 10th season of the show is available now at Art21.org. 
[embedded content]
This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org

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The stretch of 19th Street west of 10th Avenue was clogged with construction on a Monday in January when Honor Titus, wearing a North Face puffer and green-striped white Adidas, bounded up the steps to the Chelsea townhouse of Timothy Taylor Gallery. His first solo show in New York opens there on Thursday. A week ahead of the opening, it had already sold out.
Titus, who is 31, had on a plaid mask and asked the gallery’s director, Columbus Taylor, about what kind of tea they could give to gallery-goers coming by the all-day opening.
“Japanese tea, chamomile, green tea, mint tea,” Titus proposed.
“Do we need to get, like, teacups for everyone, like Alice in Wonderland?” Taylor asked.
“Actually—not mint,” Titus replied, thoughtful. “Mint is not an outdoor tea.”
Honor Titus, Artist Portrait. Photographer Kingsley Ifill. Courtesy Timothy Taylor Gallery.

Honor Titus likes tea—he drank quite a bit of herbal tea a few nights earlier while we ate dinner at Dr. Clark—and likes playing tennis and watching matches, especially if they feature the American phenom Naomi Osaka. Particular arcana gets sucked into his insatiable creative diet and spun back into his paintings. There are eight works in his show at Timothy Taylor, “For Heaven’s Sake,” and they each bottle a world.
Priced between $12,000 and $25,000, the paintings have been snapped up by top collectors such as Beth Rudin DeWoody, as well as an Asian institution and buyers in New York and the UK. It might be the best painting show in town.
“I like work that’s almost, but not really, journalistic,” Titus said, walking through the slim, chic townhouse that the London dealer Timothy Taylor took over in 2016 as a stateside beachhead.
“With the situation we’re in, I wasn’t doing much—I was painting, and playing a lot of tennis,” Titus said. “So there’s an element of nostalgia for movement, for dancing, for embrace.”
Honor Titus, Sock Hop (2020). Photo courtesy Timothy Taylor Gallery.

The paintings: a girl at a sock hop alone with other people’s unworn shoes near her pivoting ankles; a couple slow-waltzing in an apartment window; tennis players fwopping topspin-heavy forehands; a couple on the lawn of the Brand Library in Glendale, California, where Titus lives.
“I want to make paintings that a wide audience can enjoy,” Titus said. “I have a thing that I like to say: from Rikers to the Ritz. I want people to appreciate my paintings at Rikers and I want people to appreciate them at the Ritz. Those are both places that I’ve been in my personal life.”
Honor Titus. Courtesy Honor Titus.

Titus is staying at a hotel downtown. He used to live in the city, where he did frontman duties in the great spazz-punk outfit Cerebral Ballzy. (We figured out my band opened for his band once, at the Wreck Room in Bushwick, in 2008.) After working as a studio assistant for Raymond Pettibon, Titus left to begin his own practice, without an art-school degree but with a keen eye for observation in portraiture. He draws from the both the Chicago Imagists and Les Nabis—there’s a thrilling dollop of Félix Vallotton in Sock Hop. In January 2020, he had a show at Henry Taylor’s, the exhibition space the eponymous artist—a mentor of Titus’s—sometimes sets up in his downtown LA studio.
By then his style had emerged, with striking paintings of a dog in a convertible at a health food store, of two strangers in a cold movie theater on a hot summer day. Later that year, two new large paintings were among the highlights of an acclaimed floral-themed group show at Karma, “(Nothing But) Flowers.”
Honor Titus, Jazmine Perfume, shown in the Karma show “(Nothing But) Flowers.” Photo courtesy Karma.

He made these new paintings in isolation in Los Angeles, and the phantom limb experience of missing friends and family is a looming mood. One work still to be hung was a painting of a picture of his grandmother that used to be in his old house, lovingly rendered. Elsewhere, there’s a tennis player knocking a forehand and a painting of Miles Davis on a tree stump.
“Miles would just go to the woods and practice his trumpet,” Titus said. “With jazz musicians, the more common thing was practicing in the woodshed, but Miles was out in the literal woods. That image, of one the greatest musicians ever, playing alone in the woods, is a beautiful one to me.”
Honor Titus, Grounds of the Brand Library (2020)

I asked about the couple on the lawn in Glendale, white spots twinkling on the green like stars. Titus said that, about a year ago, he was dating a daughter in a prominent art-world family, and so the couple in the painting is of the artist and an old paramour.
“It didn’t end happily, but we had a moment at the Brand Library that was really perfect, self-contained,” Titus said. “I’m not one for self-portraiture, but maybe this is the closest I’ve come.”
Titus and I were staring at the impossibly sunny California landscape when one of his friends walked in from the New York chill to check out the show. After lunch, and more tea, we started a long walk east. At Fifth Avenue, we saw the arch at Washington Square Park in the distance. Some 15 blocks away, Titus remembered the quote on the top verbatim: “Let Us Raise a Standard to Which the Wise and Honest Can Repair.”
“Should we try to play tennis tonight?” Titus asked, taking strides by the fountain. There was a bubble in Midtown where he could get a court for cheap.
We popped into Punjabi Deli on Houston Street to get chai, then walked up Avenue A to Mast Books. Titus bought a book of work by Pierre Bonnard and a small chapbook of Richard Brautigan poems, and we left the store to dump empty Anthora cups in the bin on East 5th Street.
Mid-stroll, Titus took out his bounty and recited to all on the street a particularly bawdy Brautigan poem. He laughed loudly enough to be heard in Soho. Then, he decided he’d head back to his hotel instead of playing tennis get some sleep.
“I want the show to convey a certain warmth, a certain joie de vivre,” Titus said. Rather than capturing a pre-lockdown past, “it’s about being hopeful. The title of the show is ‘For Heaven’s Sake,’ and it’s all about the intonation in how you say it. The phrase can be a profanity. It can be an appeal to something higher. Or it can be about, ‘let’s get through this.’”
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