Independent 20th Century | Emma Amos & Richmond Barthé: Heroic Bodies

RYAN LEE is pleased to present Emma Amos & Richmond Barthé: Heroic Bodies for the third edition of Independent 20th Century. Of different generations, Amos (1937-2020) and Barthé (1901-1989) shared a desire to create works celebrating the heroic bodies of Black subjects—with particular interest in athletes, dancers, and performers. Both artists were pushing back against different eras of racial marginalization in the U.S., in which Black bodies were othered and denied a fundamental sense of dignity. On view at RYAN LEE’s booth is an intergenerational dialogue about Black grace, power, and beauty within the context of 20th century America.

Born in segregated Mississippi, Richmond Barthé spent his career using the visual lexicon of Classical Art to reframe harmful and racist narratives around the Black body in his sculptures through a graceful and elegant handling of the figure. A leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Barthé created some of the most intimate, refined, and romantic representations of Black figures, and was one of the only the few African American sculptors of his time. His queer gaze guided the way in which he modeled the male nude, many of whom were dancers such as Féral Benga. Barthé’s involvement in the world of performance ran deep: in the 1930s, the artist studied dance with Martha Graham to guide his interpretation of movement and musculature. In 1993, Romare Bearden wrote, “his figures of dancers, lyric portrayals of the body in motion are among his best works, achieving their effects through linear qualities rather than volume and mass.” Some of his landmark dancing sculptures include African Boy Dancing (1937). A rare, early cast of this work will be on view among other works by Barthé.

Also born in the segregated South, Emma Amos is known for her career-long preoccupation with the politics of the Black body. In the 1980s, she began her acclaimed Animals and Athletes series, in which she juxtaposed the gleaming bodies of famous Black athletes with exotic animals such as panthers and lions. Images of Black athletes such as Carl Lewis, Michael Jordan, and Jackie Joyner-Kersee dominated the media buoyed by the excitement of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, from which Amos drew inspiration. Particularly sensitive to how, in her words, black athletes are “lionized” for their skills, and later “discarded as injured or aging,” Amos employed wild animals as pictorial foils in her athletic portraits. During this time, she also created powerful paintings and works on paper of dancers, such as Josephine Baker and Bill T. Jones. Amos was fond of self-portraits, and sometimes inserted her own likeness among these idolized Black figures.

Also on view in this presentation, will be newly released works by Emma Amos in a range of media. This will include a woven painting, a shaped paper pulp work, and six works on paper from Amos’s landmark Water Series—a series stemming from her anxieties and fears, including her own inability to swim. A meditation on bodily autonomy and racial stereotypes, Amos explained in a 1989 interview: “I did the water series to exorcise my fear of water. Abandon. That’s the ticket.”

In 2023, Barthé’s sculptures were on view in the landmark exhibition The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in Isaac Julien’s installation at the Whitney Biennial; in 2024, Amos’s paintings will be included in upcoming exhibitions: Edges of Ailey at the Whitney Museum and Get in the Game at SFMOMA, both opening this fall. Amos’s work is currently also on view at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the St Louis Art Museum.