Last seen in London in 2017 at Tate Modern’s exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, pioneering African American artist Emma Amos’ (1937 - 2020) exhibition at Alison Jacques gallery in London is a long-overdue celebration of one of the most dynamic and quietly radical figures in American art. Spanning five decades of her practice, the show offers a sweeping, richly layered view of an artist who remained steadfastly committed to the human figure, to experimental colour and composition, and to quiet but insistent political engagement. Born in 1937 in Atlanta, Georgia, Amos studied at Antioch College in Ohio and later at the Central School of Art in London. Returning to the United States in the early 1960s, she settled in New York, where she would become the youngest and only female member of Spiral, a collective of African American artists—among them Romare Bearden, Charles Alston and Hale Woodruff—formed to respond to the Civil Rights movement through visual expression.

Her inclusion in Spiral was both groundbreaking and isolating. While welcomed as a talented young artist, Amos was also conscious of the double bind she faced—as both Black and a woman—in a community still dominated by male narratives. This dual awareness of race and gender would go on to shape her work in subtle, powerful ways. Amos’ early paintings, including her Attitude series, feature confident female figures, many of them modelled on herself. Mixed media print Three Ladies (1970) shows three frontal semi-clad and nude figures in a unique compositional grid presented as three distinct individuals as opposed to a group. The confidence of the women in their provocative postures and eye contact is also seen in Dream Girl (1975) and Dream Girl with Woven Camisole (1978), both reclining figures facing the viewer, in sharp contrast to the coquettish flirtation of the odalisque paintings by modern male artists. Decorative patterns contrast with areas of solid colour, a reference to the artist’s weaving and fabric design skills. These works immediately assert the body—especially the Black female body—as a central and unapologetic subject, an approach that was both radical and deeply personal in a time when few Black women artists were afforded space in galleries or museums.

The human figure remained central throughout Amos’ practice, evolving in form but never in focus. In later decades, her figures move through water, fall through air in London Bridge is Falling Down (1991) and Head First (2006), or push against ambiguous spaces that seem to be both real and symbolic. As in the large 1986 triptych Dancing in the Streets of three women with their arms flung over their heads surrounded by visible brush strokes and birds heightening the movement in the work, Amos often painted people mid-motion—swimming, diving, falling, reaching—capturing not just physicality but vulnerability, resistance and a longing for transcendence.

Amos’ approach to materials was as boundary-pushing as her figuration. She refused to separate painting from textile, high art from craft, or tradition from experimentation. Her surfaces frequently combine acrylic paint with African fabrics, including Kente and batik, as well as with handwoven textiles she created herself. She was trained as a weaver and this knowledge of textile processes appears again and again—not only in the materials she used but in the structural, layered logic of her compositions. In her last stages of working, she returned to the single figure. As we can see in My Green Space (2011) and A Good Book (2013), she combines the frontal posture with intense colouration - vivid greens, blues, reds - layering fabric pieces within the painted surface and finally framing the works with patterned fabric borders. Borders and frames do more than contain her images; they engage in a visual conversation with the central figures, embedding them in cultural memory and diasporic lineage.

Printmaking was another crucial dimension of her practice. Amos was a master of various techniques—etching, silkscreen, collagraphy and photo-transfer—and she frequently combined them to produce richly complex images. Her prints, like her paintings, often address themes of history, representation and cultural erasure. While Amos’ political voice was not overtly confrontational, it was always present. Her assertion that simply entering the studio as a Black woman was a political act reflects the quiet but potent stance her work takes. She did not produce protest art in the traditional sense, but her art insists on visibility, on the right to occupy space and speak through image, texture and form. Her figures often appear in defiance of gravity or history, surrounded by symbols of African heritage and modern Black identity. The work is infused with personal narrative, historical consciousness and social critique, all delivered through lush and vivid formal choices.

In the 1980s and ‘90s, Amos became increasingly involved in feminist circles, joining the Guerrilla Girls, the anonymous group of female artists who challenged sexism and racism in the art world through bold, graphic posters and public interventions. Though she remained anonymous in this role—as all Guerrilla Girls did—her participation added another layer to her lifelong advocacy for equity in the arts.

The exhibition at Alison Jacques is both a retrospective and a revelation. Works from her earliest self-portraits to her complex textile-and-paint hybrids of the 1990s and 2000s show an artist in constant dialogue with history, with form and with herself. Emma Amos passed away in 2020, but this exhibition confirms her place not just as a significant African American artist but as a major figure in the history of postwar art. Her insistence on the body, on colour, on fabric and on rewriting the visual archive from within makes her work deeply relevant today.

Emma Amos’ solo exhibition is on view at Alison Jacques from July 10 – August 9, 2025. The show reopens from 2 - 27 September, 2025