Virtual | Tour of ‘Emma Amos: Color Odyssey’ with Shawnya Harris

ArtTable is a 501.c.3 organization. All programs are non-refundable.

About the speakers

Laurel Garber is Park Family Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She is the PMA’s curator of Emma Amos: Color Odyssey, organized by the Georgia Museum of Art. Laurel is also a PhD candidate at Northwestern University, where she is completing a dissertation on the social position of the printer in nineteenth-century France. Laurel has held positions and fellowships at the Art Institute of Chicago, Getty Museum, Clark Art Institute, and Courtauld Gallery. She received an MA at the Courtauld as well as a BA from Cornell University.

Shawnya L. Harris, Ph.D. is the organizing curator for Emma Amos: Color Odyssey, centering on the work of the late feminist artist Emma Amos (1937-2020). Harris is the Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson Curator of African American and African Diasporic Art at the Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia. Recently, Harris has been a fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership. She earned her doctorate in art history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is also an alumna of Yale University.

Jodi Throckmorton is the curator of contemporary art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia. Before joining PAFA in fall 2014, she was curator of modern and contemporary art at the Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University in Kansas. Prior to that, she was associate curator at the San Jose Museum of Art in California. She organized the exhibition and publications for Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World (2018) with Lauren Dickens and Postdate: Photography and Inherited History in India (2015). Her other recent projects include Nick Cave: Rescue (2018), Paul Chan: Pillowsophia (2017),  Melt/Carve/Forge: Embodied Sculptures by Cassils (2016), Alyson Shotz: Plane Weave (2016), Bruce Conner: Somebody Else’s Prints (2014), Questions from the Sky: New Work by Hung Liu (2013), Dive Deep: Eric Fischl and the Process of Painting (2013), Ranu Mukherjee: Telling Fortunes (2012), and This Kind of Bird Flies Backward: Paintings by Joan Brown (2011). The major retrospective, Joan Semmel: Skin in the Game is Throckmorton’s most recent exhibition and publication project.

About the exhibition

Emma Amos: A Color Odyssey | Across her prolific career as a pioneering artist, educator, and activist, Emma Amos (American, 1937–2020) created boldly colorful and innovative works that explore the intersections of race and gender in American life. This exhibition surveys her body of work from the 1950s to the 2010s for the first time, spotlighting her inventive approach to printmaking, painting, and weaving as well as her signature practice of combining distinctive materials and artistic techniques. Amos’ works investigate identity and privilege while unsettling the lines between figuration and abstraction, craft and fine art, beauty and power.

Image: Emma Amos (1937-2020), Pool Lady, 1980; etching, aquatint and stencil; Gift of the Collectors Committee; courtesy the National Gallery of Art // Emma Amos (1937-2020), Never (for Vivian Browne), 1993, Acrylic on canvas with African fabric borders, 45 × 34 inches; Amos Family, courtesy RYAN LEE Gallery

Thank you to Shelley Langdale, ArtTable DC Chapter Programs Co-chair, for organizing this program.