Out in Front

Emma Amos was a distinguished painter, printmaker, and weaver. Influenced by modern Western European art, Abstract Expressionism, the Civil Rights movement and feminism, Amos explored the politics of culture and issues of racism, sexism and ethnocentrism through her paintings and works on paper. Throughout her career, Amos utilized color as a pictorial element to shape and make sense of the world around her, as well as to question its given order. As an artist of mixed race, Amos was keenly aware of the multiple and complex meanings and implications of color. The artist’s love of color and her concern about its meaning are evident in the 1982 weaving/collage, Out in Front, constructed of fabrics which Amos wove and then cut up to make the painting. This process, characteristic of her work in the late 70’s and early 80’s, involved cutting up the fabrics she had previously woven in order to create a new identity out of the fragments of her former self.