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Emma Amos

Philadelphia Museum of Art to Present First Major Retrospective Exhibition Dedicated to Emma Amos (1937–2020)

Emma Amos Retrospective PMA
“Godzilla,” 1966, by Emma Amos. Oil on canvas, 50 × 46 inches; framed: 51 1/4 x 47 1/4 inches. Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute Museum of Art, Utica, NY.

October 11, 2021January 17, 2022 

Morgan Galleries and Jane and Leonard Korman Galleries 150153 

In October, the Philadelphia Museum of Art will present the first major retrospective exhibition of the work of Emma Amos. As a member of the Black artist collective, Spiral, in the mid-1960s, an active participant in the Guerilla Girls of the 1980s, and a pathbreaking multimedia artist until her death in 2020, Amos made vibrant, witty, and passionate works that challenge, unsettle, and sometimes altogether reject the dominant visual codes of American life. Across her prolific career, Amos’s art explored the links among personal biography, history, and the politics of race and gender in America. Organized by the Georgia Museum of Art, Emma Amos: Color Odyssey surveys Amos’s body of work from the late 1950s to the 2010s for the first time, highlighting her bold approach to printmaking, painting, and weaving, and the distinctive combination of disparate materials and artistic techniques that she employed to produce works of unmistakable artistic and critical charge.

In an interview in 1991, Amos remarked, “Every time I think about color, it’s a political statement.” The exhibition will explore the rich implications of that claim, following the ways in which Amos’s works investigate aspects of identity and privilege while unsettling the lines between figuration and abstraction, craft and fine art, beauty, and power. Emma Amos: Color Odyssey will begin with the artist’s early years when, finding her way to New York by way of London, she would become the youngest and only female member of Spiral, which formed in response to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. These early works reveal an artist beginning to connect an interest in abstract expressionism to problems of figuration and subjectivity posed by the realities of American racism, with Amos exploring the significance of color as it relates to the Black female body. This subject would go on to become a major focal point throughout Amos’s career as she began to engage more deeply with mediums such as weaving and printmaking and to participate in the feminist and multicultural debates of the 1970s and 1980s.

Emma Amos Retrospective PMA
“American Girl,” 1974, by Emma Amos. From the portfolio Impressions: Our World, Volume 1, 1973-1974. Printed by Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, New York. Etching and lift ground aquatint (edition of 35), plate: 15 3/4 × 19 13/16 inches; sheet: 22 1/8 × 30 inches.; framed: 27 1/2 × 35 1/2 inches. Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 2018. Image courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2021.

The exhibition is organized chronologically and thematically, tracking how Amos pushed her painting, weaving, and printmaking practices and often combined these media to better represent the grace, beauty, and power of Black figures, from anonymous models to leaders such as Paul Robeson and Zora Neale Hurston. Color Odyssey follows Amos’s deepening critical investigation into the centrality of race and gender to the values of Western art, notably though the making of massive multimedia works that interrogate the power and authority of the artist. The Philadelphia presentation of the exhibition will give emphasis to the ways in which these thematic and political concerns pushed Amos to experiment widely with materials and techniques, particularly in print.

Highlights among the early works include the painting Godzilla, 1966 (Munson Williams Proctor Institute of Art) which features three front-facing seated women, one of whom is nude, another is seen clothed, and a middle figure appears faceless. Each figure is depicted with brownish limbs of various skin tones while the overall composition offers a rich arrangement of gestural forms placed in combination with flat, unmodulated swathes of contrasting color. The artist returns to the theme of the female trinity in 3 Ladies, 1970 (Philadelphia Museum of Art), a color etching, printed relief, and screen print in which lyrical gestural elements have given way to a sharp juxtaposition of graphic shapes that convey the artist’s virtuosity. This experimental, five-part composition underscores her ongoing pre-occupation with femme-centric themes. Among the notable works of the artist’s later production is Tightrope, 1994 (Minneapolis Institute of Art) which illustrates, in bold acrylic colors on linen with African textile borders, the monumental struggles Amos faced as an artist without the privileges afforded to white masculinity. In this monumental narrative self-portrait, Amos resolutely strides across a tightrope while donning a Wonder Woman costume that is only partially concealed under an artist’s smock. In one hand, she indignantly raises a T shirt emblazoned with an image of the naked torso of Gauguin’s Tahitian child bride while in the other she confidently wields a pair of paint brushes against a night sky.

Emma Amos Retrospective PMA
“All I know of Wonder,” 2008, by Emma Amos. Oil on canvas with African fabric borders, 70 1/2 × 55 1/2 inches. Collection of Mary Ryan, Courtesy of Ryan Lee Gallery, New York.

The organizing curator for Emma Amos: Color Odyssey is Dr. Shawnya L. Harris, Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson Curator of African American and African Diasporic Art at the Georgia Museum of Art. “Coming of age during the countercultural movements of the 1960s and straddling various artistic movements from abstract expressionism to pop art, Amos reckoned with issues of race, class, and gender roles that emerged in the development of her style,” Dr. Harris said. “Her imaginative and sometimes satirical take on cultural difference shifted and grew richer over the decades, merging various media and blurring categories of fine and applied arts as a form of resistance.”

At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the exhibition is curated by Laurel Garber, the Park Family Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings, with the assistance of Theresa A. Cunningham, Margaret R. Mainwaring Curatorial Fellow. Garber, who wrote the catalog’s essay on Amos’s prints, added: “The sweep of Amos’s career opens a window onto an artistic practice that is guided by a rich creative and political engagement in American life. Her work is at once approachable and challenging, inviting reflections on identity, beauty, and femininity. Throughout her career, Amos worked in a wide range of printmaking techniques, including intaglio, screen print, monotype, and collagraphy, and we will show the broad range of innovative editions, monoprints, and other printed works on paper so that visitors can fully appreciate the interconnectedness of her vision across media.”

Catalogue

Emma Amos: Color Odyssey is accompanied by a major scholarly volume of the same title, edited by Dr. Shawnya L. Harris, and published in hardback by the Georgia Museum of Art (ISBN: 9780915977468). This catalogue includes an introductory essay by Dr. Harris and contributions by the artists Kay Walkingstick and LaToya Ruby Frazier, each of whom offers a personal reflection on Amos. Lisa Farrington, Associate Dean for Fine Arts, Howard University, discusses Amos’s place in the history of women artists. Phoebe Wolfskill, Associate Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, focuses on the performativity of race and gender in Amos’ work. Laurel Garber explores the artist’s career-long printmaking practice and her collaborations with master printers. The book is available at the Philadelphia Museum of Art Store and may be purchased on site or online via Philamuseum.org.

About Emma Amos

Emma Veoria Amos was born in 1937 in Atlanta, Georgia. Her family owned a drug store established by her father and grandfather, the first Black pharmacist in the state. She attended Antioch College in Ohio, graduating in 1958 with a degree in fine art before moving to London where she earned a diploma in etching at the Central School of Art in the next year. Arriving in New York in 1960, she joined Spiral, the artist activist group which included Romare Bearden, Hale Woodruff, Norman Lewis, and Charles Alston. In 1965, she earned her master’s degree in education from New York University and later taught at the Dalton School in New York. She also held positions as a textile designer and served briefly as a host of a television show about craft. Amos was an important member of Heresies, a feminist magazine founded in 1976 by Joyce Kozloff, Miriam Shapiro, Lucy Lippard, and others. As a member of the Guerilla Girls, Amos protested art world injustices including the unequal representation of women in the arts. In 1980, she began a teaching at Rutgers University, where she would become Professor and Chair of Visual Arts at the Mason Gross School of Art. She retired from Rutgers in 2008. The artist moved in 2019 to Bedford, NH in 2019 where she died the following year. Emma Amos: Color Odyssey premiered in January 2021 at the Georgia Museum of Art and traveled to the Munson Williams Proctor Institute in Utica, NY (through September 12, 2021) before its final stop at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Support

The exhibition is organized by the Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia. This program is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, University of Georgia. At the Georgia Museum of Art, additional support was provided by the W. Newton Morris Foundation and the Friends of the Georgia Museum of Art.

In Philadelphia, Emma Amos: Color Odyssey is made possible by the Kathleen C. and John J. F. Sherrerd Fund for Exhibitions, the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation, and Emily and Mike Cavanagh.

Credits as of July 19, 2021.

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July

Pygmalion, Roberta Gross, Shapes and Colors of Summer in July, The Plastic Club

Shapes and Colors of Summer in July
ONLINE MONTHLY EXHIBITION AT PLASTIC CLUB

The Plastic Club’s building is closed, but the Club is resuming its regular schedule of monthly shows with an online exhibition devoted to the shapes and colors of Summer.

The Summer show opens Wednesday, July 1. The art can be viewed on the Plastic Club‘s website (www.plasticclub.org) then. There will also be one of the Club’s “Third Sunday” online Salons with discussion about the exhibit on Sunday, July 19, from 1 to 2 PM.

Entries can be realistic or abstract, based on reality or your imagination, or any combination of these approaches.  Any medium is accepted. Physical artwork must be submitted in the form of a photograph or video. A reasonably clear cell phone photo or video should suffice. As always, original digital imagery, photography and video are also welcome.

Due to the building closure, we have devised a simple method to submit your photograph, image or video along with your contact information. For detailed instructions, see the “Call for Submissions” on the Exhibitions Tab of the Club’s website, www.plasticclub.org.

A lottery will select three entrants to win a prize: four free workshop sessions when the Club re-opens.

The Plastic Club, located on historic Camac Street, was founded in 1897 by a group of women artists to promote the arts to the public and support artists both in the Philadelphia community and beyond.

The Plastic Club, 247 South Camac Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19107

Thank you to Bob Moore for the content of this post.

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Dynamics

brooke lanier fine art

Fluid Dynamics, Geoffrey Agrons, Sebastien Leclercq, Deborah Weiss, and Brooke Lanier

brooke lanier fine art

820 S. 4th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19147

Phone: 267-329-9653

Email: brooke.lanier@gmail.com

Website: brookelanier.com/fluid_dynamics

Fluid Dynamics

Geoffrey Agrons, Sebastien Leclercq, Deborah Weiss, and Brooke Lanier

November 15, 2019 – January 3, 2020

Opening Reception Friday, November 22 5:30pm – 8:00pm

Holiday Party Friday, December 20, 5:30pm-8pm

Water inspires a unique fascination as a visually complex, mesmerizing substance that is also essential for human life.   From the pristine to the toxic, turbulent to placid, Fluid Dynamics assembles a collection of photographs and paintings that address a diverse spectrum of ways of depicting, contemplating, and interacting with bodies of water.

Deborah Weiss’s oil paintings on panel are the most abstract and gestural pieces in the show, utilizing an intriguing absence of contextual cues as to the scale of the subject.  The palette and textures suggest shorelines with intricate deposits of silt, but they could easily be interpreted as storm systems, ocean currents, or weathered wood.

The patterns in Weiss’s paintings would feel right at home as vignettes along the shoreline of the Salton Sea in Geoffrey Agrons’s photos. In the 1950’s and 1960’s the area was home to luxury resorts. By the 1970s, agricultural runoff, evaporation, and low rainfall had rendered the water toxic and saltier than the Pacific Ocean. Massive fish die-offs, algal blooms, and related bird deaths rendered the area unattractive for those seeking a beach vacation.  Other photographs capture scenes from shorelines impacted by hurricanes, pollution, and drought. Independent of this narrative, the photographs contain melancholy yet peaceful vistas punctuated by bleached driftwood and architectural relics of nautical activity.

Agrons’ ecological allegories pair with Sebastien Leclercq’s scenes of shipping vessels that damage the very environment upon which their industry depends.  The views from different parts of the world, desert and arctic, imply different facets of climate change.  Leclercq spent five weeks aboard several ships in the Finnish Maritime Fleet, documenting the contemporary state of an ancient tradition. The boats are so enormous that at times they seem abstracted and transformed into colorful, geometric compositional elements rather than floating factories.

Leclercq’s views of ships lend context to Brooke Lanier’s paintings. The saturated colors and hard edges of boats and docks create a collage effect in real life.  Lanier pushes that line of thought and creates collage-based paintings that recombine beloved landscapes in the composited manner of unreliable memories. Alongside Leclercq’s photographs, Lanier’s paintings are reconnected to their origins, creating a dialogue.

Gallery Hours are Tuesday and Thursday 12pm – 6pm, Friday 11am – 5pm, Saturday 11am – 3pm, by appointment or chance.  The gallery will be closed December 22 – 29, 2019 for the holidays and open by appointment in January.

Thank you to Brooke Lanier for the content of this post.

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Daughters

Nature’s Daughters: Solo Art Exhibition and Networking,

Jessica Libor, Da Vinci Art Alliance

Nature's Daughters: Solo Art Exhibition and Networking, Jessica Libor, Da Vinci Art Alliance
Jessica Libor, Da Vinci Art Alliance

Enjoy original artwork and creative networking at this unique event.
See Jessica Libor’s new pieces in her solo exhibition “Nature’s Daughters,” on view for one night only at the Da Vinci Art Alliance on Wednesday, September 4th from 5-8pm. Celebrate women with Jessica’s art and also with networking expert Jennifer Lynn Robinson. Men are also welcome to attend!


“I want to show the glamour of nature. Whenever I am outdoors in the wild, I feel the most beautiful and free. I don’t think I am alone in this experience. What I wanted to do was show this feeling visually. I want people to be swept away in a gorgeous fantasy of the absolute magic that nature weaves sometimes. I painted women because it felt like a natural expression of nature—like the earth, the feminine can have many sides to it, can bring forth new life, and often express their beauty by decorating themselves…something I am interested in drawing a correlation with.”


Jessica Libor graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2014 and has been painting, curating and writing since. Find out more at www.jessicalibor.com.


At 7 PM, Jessica will say a few words about the artwork, and Jennifer Lynn Robinson, Esquire of Purposeful Networking will provide her 5 best tips for women to network more strategically. You will also be able to ask Jennifer your networking questions one on one. Find out more at https://www.purposefulnetworking.com/.

There will be light bites and drinks provided. This event is free for all and open to the public! Registration is encouraged.

Wed, September 4, 2019, 5:00 PM – 8:00 PM EDTA

Location: Da Vinci Art Alliance, 704 Catharine Street, Philadelphia, PA 19147

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moments

Gail Kolflat, Moments in Place: moments in time, Main Line Art Center

June 14 – July 15, 2019, Main Line Art Center 746 Panmure Road, Haverford, PA 19041

Monday – Thursday 9am-9pm Friday – Sunday 9am-5pm.


Suitable Arrangements: time and place, Gail Kolflat, 38 x 48 inches oil/acrylic


Reminiscent of a shadow box with 4 overlapping layers, beyond the pink liatris and blue hydrangea in the foreground, this painting presents a couple of women actively engaged in floral design activity and conversation during an evening session of flower arranging. Behind them a woman works on her creation, and in the distance through the window, cars are parked under a darkening sky – the mode of transportation for the aficionados.

Melding The Collegiate: lessons learned, Gail Kolflat, 46 x 40 inches oil / acrylic


College life! Students between classes mingle and walk on campus grounds, with a stately school building behind them. In this painting, there’s a clear dialogue between abstract and representational elements, forming the body of the composition.


Life and the Progression of Human Bonds : birth and demise, diptych 38 x 96 inches (when flat) oil/acrylic, Gail Kolflat


This is a poignant painting that highlights the maternal bond of a mother and her new daughter, and the daughter’s compassion and sorrow after the death of her mother years later. Raw human emotions transpired from two of life’s most significant events, combine and contrast making this a powerful piece.

Exciting colors and engaging themes draw viewers into the vibrant paintings of regional artist Gail Kolflat. Eye-catching, and invigorating, this one-person exhibition touches on themes of social commentary, with an emphasis on compositions featuring people involved in assorted activities and events, such as: a concert in a park, a flower arrangement class, commuters on a train, students at a university, or a lakeside interlude. Kolflat’s interpretation of Americana and genre painting is contemporary, and uniquely fresh, with distinctive hues and a stylish manner of presentation. A number of works are multi-panel, large format compositions and several have irregular shaped borders. All are painted in oil and acrylic on canvas.

“In a sense these works portray America in positive and refreshing tones that are so rare in contemporary art. It’s America at play, and it is a significant facet of our culture as is violence and drug abuse. Kolflat’s work stands alongside those artists who came before who have portrayed a segment of a population, one that describes a particular time and place. Like Impressionists with their sun dazzled boating scenes and picnics, Kolflat’s people at play describe an innocence in America that still exists.” Marilyn J Fox

Gail Kolflat is a notable east coast artist, who returned to the exhibition arena in 2013 after taking a fifteen year break while raising her daughters. She has long, strong exhibition history, and currently serves as the Membership Chairperson for the New York City Chapter of the Women’s Caucus for Art.


Midsummer Trilogy : sorting through waves of circumstance, irregular perimeter 147 x 74 inches oil/acrylic, Gail Kolflat


This piece represents two anticipatory gatherings, one of several girl friends primping and chatting, the other of male friends casually relaxing and enjoying refreshments, and finally center stage, a melding of the highlighted parties into respective pairings. The idea behind the creation of this piece flowed from a series of optimistic possibilities related to young graduates in my orbit, their coteries, encouraging news from professionals, and the glow of a positive mindset.

Artist Statement: Gail Kolflat


As an artist I find it compelling to create compositions of human society. My paintings are a recording of people today, living in our world, partaking in experiences, culture and lifestyles common to us all. Painted over a period of months, my compositions evolve much on their own.
A spontaneous abstract footprint initiates every work. It is intertwined with figurative representations derived from sketches and photographs used as sources for the primary layout of a painting. The sources are then disregarded, as I prefer to improvise from that point onward, relying on a continuing interaction of realistic and abstract principles. Using human forms, objects, landscapes, and buildings, I invite the viewer into a world he/she can recognize, understand and share – as if at the scene, participating in an event, or surmising a situation. The abstract elements “free the viewer from the monotony and predictability of a too real vision.”
My work consists of singular or multi-panel assemblages, executed with a broad use of color. Color is of great significance, appealing to emotions and mood. I allow myself to use any pigments that seem appropriate for a painting; instinct derived from experience.
Observing and delving into the interplay of shapes, textures and colors is what drew me into the visual arts. I focus on groupings of people – who they are, where they are, why they are there, the ambiance surrounding them collectively as well as individually. Tapestries, textiles, Art Nouveau, modern abstract painting, Impressionism, the human condition and numerous venues in Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City continue to serve as inspiration for my work. The greatest contributing factor to the development of my art is a need to create.

Entertainment and Amusement: summer fare, summer fair, 82 x 59 inches, triptych, oil/acrylic, Gail Kolflat

Thank you to Gail Kolflat for the content of this post.

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