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Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
EMMA AMOS Three color prints.
Harvest, color aquatint and embossing on cream wove paper, 1959. Artist's proof. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed "artist's proof" in pencil, lower margin * Harvest II, color etching, aquatint and drypoint on heavy cream wove paper, 1959. Artist's proof. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed "Proof" in pencil, lower margin * Pompeii, color aquatint on heavy cream wove paper, 1959. Artist's proof. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed "Proof" in pencil, lower margin. Very good impressions with strong colors.
Amos (1937-2020) was a Postwar Abstract African-American painter and printmaker. She was born and raised in Atlanta, and took an interest in art at an early age. Amos made these early prints after she returned to London's Central School of Art and Design to continue to study printmaking. During her fourth year at Antioch College in Ohio, from which she received her B.F.A. degree in 1958, she first went to England and studied etching at the Central School. According to Amos, "I really think I found and stopped worrying about myself as an artist my second year in England--etching and the whole idea of printmaking and having a handsome, a well-thought-out and finished work that satisfies you." In 1960, Amos moved to New York to work with two printmaking studios, joining the printmaking studios of Letterio Calapai (a part of Stanley William Hayter's Atelier 17, Paris and New York) and Robert Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop. Despite her difficulties as an African American woman in the New York art scene at the time, Amos persevered and received her M.A. from New York University in 1966. While at NYU, she became reacquainted with Hale Woodruff, with whom she had tried to study with in Atlanta, who was a professor there at the time. Woodruff helped Amos with her printmaking and introduced her to Spiral, a collective of approximately fifteen prominent African American artists, with whom she exhibited in 1965 at their first and only exhibit, in a rented gallery space at 147 Christopher Street. During the 1970s, Amos went on to teach textile design at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts, New Jersey, and gained prominence weaving on her own looms at Threadbare, a yarn and weaving shop on Bleecker Street, New York. She later became a Professor at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, New Jersey.
