Art Basel Miami Beach | Emma Amos

RYAN LEE Gallery is pleased to present a solo booth of Emma Amos’s (1937-2020) dynamic athlete paintings and works on paper, including basketball players, football players, gymnasts, divers, and runners. This is Amos’s first solo presentation at Art Basel Miami Beach. Many of these landmark large-scale paintings have never been exhibited before. On view are portraits of American track and field stars Carl Lewis and Evelyn Ashford as well as football player Emmitt Smith. RYAN LEE will be presenting in Booth S8.

Inspired by the 1984 and 1988 Olympics, these works celebrate the Black figure. Portrayals of athletes and dancers were a running theme through Amos’s practice. Depicting men and women who are performing at the top of their fields, Amos championed these public figures for their excellence and success. In some of these paintings, Amos paired athletes with animals, comparing their strengths and vulnerabilities as she explored the way that society revered and exoticized the Black body. Paralleling images of sports players with leopards, cheetahs, and alligators, she suggested the fleeting and illusory power, both in physicality and influence, of the Black athlete.

I want to make clear the relationships between artists, athletes, entertainers, and thinkers, and the prowess, ferocity, steadfastness, and dynamism of animals”

— Emma Amos

Amos combined textiles and painting, blurring the gendered lines between crafts and the fine arts. For a brief time, she used her own hand-woven textiles but due to the laborious nature of this process there are only a handful of paintings made with her own weaving. The paintings on view at Art Basel Miami Beach are a rare offering from this period. She later pivoted to using imported African textiles, expanding into a wider range of hues and motifs. Amos used the patterns, colors, and textures of the cloth to enhance the sense of movement in her compositions.

Emmitt Smith is portrayed in Football Player and Alligators (c. 1987), wearing the number 22 on his jersey as he rushes, head down, towards his opponent. Smith played for the University of Florida Gators for three years before his long career with the NFL, playing primarily with the Dallas Cowboys. He is the NFL’s all time leading rusher. Alligators have protective armor on their bodies made of bony plates, similar to the way that football players wear helmets and pads.

Runners with Cheetah (1983) is one of only a handful of large-scale paintings of female runners. (Another is Hurdlers I, recently acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.) The runners sprint towards the viewer, paired with a cheetah, which is the fastest land animal. This work demonstrates the ways in which Amos used textiles as a framing device: from the striped border at the top to the fringe at the bottom to the orange fabric that sets off the cheetah. Amos even used pieces of fabric to add texture to the hair of one of the runners, as it streams behind her.

In Star and Leopard (1983), Amos juxtaposes the coiled kinetic energy of a leopard with the grace and power of a basketball player in motion. The artist used the directionality of her weaving to emphasize the athlete’s musculature. This is one of only two basketball paintings that Amos created. The other, 22 and Cheetah, is in the collection of the Nasher Museum of Art, NC.

Unafraid to experiment with a variety of approaches, the works on paper displayed in our booth showcase the breadth of Amos’s practice – from monoprints to pastels to collages with handmade paper. These colorful and inventive works incorporate unusual additions such as stitching and glitter.

One of Amos’s athlete paintings (Hurdlers I, 1983) was recently acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA and was included in their recent exhibition Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture. This exhibition is currently on view at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, AR and will travel to the Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL in 2026, as institutions plan exhibits related to the 2028 Olympics. In 2026, the Cleveland Museum of Art will present a solo exhibition of Amos’s work centering around her monumental portrait series The Gift (1990–94) which the museum recently acquired. Recent major exhibitions include Emma Amos: Color Odyssey (2021, Georgia Museum of Art, GA; traveled to the Munson Museum, NY and Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA) and Edges of Ailey (2024, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY).

Hurdlers I (collection of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) on view at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Amos was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1937. She graduated from Antioch College in Ohio in 1958 and went on to study at the Central School of Art in London. Upon finishing her studies in England, Amos moved to New York City. She earned her Masters in Arts from New York University in 1965. Beginning in 1961, she spent a decade working as a weaver with Dorothy Liebes. Amos lived and worked in Soho and downtown New York from the 1960s up until her death in 2019. Amos’s commitment to interrogating the art-historical status quo yielded a body of vibrant and intellectually rigorous work. An artist known for pushing technical and thematic boundaries, Amos unabashedly made art that reflected her experience as a Black woman. Joining Spiral in 1964, Amos was the only female member of this NYC-based artist collective. She later became involved in various underground feminist collectives, including Heresies from 1982 to 1993, and the trailblazing Guerrilla Girls group as a founding member in 1985.

Her work is held in over 40 museum collections, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Bass Museum of Art, FL; Blanton Museum of Art, TX; Birmingham Museum of Art, AL; British Museum, UK; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Cleveland Museum of Art, OH; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, AR; Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; Georgia Museum of Art, GA; Harvard Art Museums, MA; James F. Byrnes Institute, Germany; McNay Art Museum, TX; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Museo de las Artes, Mexico; Nasher Museum of Art, NC; National Gallery of Art, DC; Newark Museum, NJ; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; RISD Museum, RI; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Smithsonian American Art Museum, DC; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; and Yale University Art Gallery, CT, among others.

Art Basel Miami Beach | Emma Amos

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