Emma Amos

Ryan Lee Gallery is pleased to present Bathers, showcasing five paintings and seventeen works on paper by Emma Amos (b. 1937 Atlanta, GA - d. 2020 Bedford, NH) that depict Black figures bathing and swimming, created between 1966 and 2009. This is a subject that the artist explored and revisited in every decade of her career.

The artist depicted people – mostly women – swimming, lounging, and sometimes doing nothing at all. Amos said, “These pictures represent freedom to me, a definite letting go.” Amos’s color palette, ranging from tawny browns to sun-soaked orange and watery blue, accentuates the feeling of ease and contentment in so many of these works.

The earliest work in the show is Two Standing Women (1966), in which the women gaze directly at the viewer with confidence and poise. Exhibited here for the first time together is an extraordinary series of aquatints made from 1975-1980 that depict women at rest solo or paired in a group – assured, beautiful and powerful in bathing suits. Gold Coast (2008) is one of the latest works in the show and is being exhibited for the first time. Bordered by African fabric, its central figure strikes a jubilant pose under her colorful umbrella.

Amos couldn’t swim, but she loved spending time near the water. As a child, Amos enjoyed time at the segregated Washington Park Pool in her home city of Atlanta, Georgia. Images of Black joy and leisure resonate amidst the long American history of segregation and discrimination that led to “separate but equal” pools and beaches. Amos was all too aware of the racialized implications of Black people in water, noting that “so many of us Black women never enjoyed water because as children we feared unleashing the terrible mass of tangled hair that would break combs and bring tears to our eyes.”

The bather was a recurring theme throughout the history of art – painted by artists from Titian to Cézanne – but images of Black bathers were less commonly portrayed. Building on Amos’s work, contemporary artists such as Derrick Adams and Amy Sherald have explored the topic in recent years.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog with an essay by Dr. Adrienne L. Childs. “These images are at once personal, a release from her own fears, and a site of familial memory,” Childs writes. “With a deft hand and a subtle touch, her bathers and swimmers accomplish something quietly radical: they empower Black figures to enjoy the freedom of un-surveilled leisure.”

Emma Amos (b. 1937 Atlanta, GA – d. 2020 Bedford, NH) was a pioneering artist, educator, and activist. A dynamic painter and masterful colorist, her commitment to interrogating the art-historical status quo yielded a body of vibrant and intellectually rigorous work. Influenced by modern Western European art, Abstract Expressionism, the civil rights movement and feminism, Amos was drawn to exploring the politics of culture and issues of racism, sexism, and ethnocentrism in her art. “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.”