The Many Styles of Emma Amos, and Her Drive to Get Free

The artist, who died last year, used collage and fabric to break out of painting’s confines. Now her works are on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

PHILADELPHIA — Spend a few hours on social media, and you’ll come across heated discussions about who gets to speak for whom. That makes it a good time for an exhibition of art by Emma Amos, a painter, printmaker and weaver who grappled with age-old questions of identity and authority that feel freshly urgent. “Emma Amos: Color Odyssey,” a survey of her work organized by the Georgia Museum of Art and now on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, comes at an opportune moment.

Yet the show is also a lesson about the role that Amos, as a Black female artist, railed against in her life and has been cast in even after her death last year. Curated by the Georgia Museum’s Shawnya L. Harris, and in Philadelphia, Laurel Garber, “Color Odyssey” contains about 60 works. It is an exhilarating survey, but it is not, as Amos deserves, a major retrospective (see: the Jasper Johns mega-exhibition down the hall). Additional space to allow for the inclusion of at least one large-scale project and a timeline in the galleries would have been a good start.

The lack feels apparent walking through “Color Odyssey” because the exhibition confirms her brilliance. Amos’s work is rigorous and complex, clever and passionate, jam-packed with intellectual and emotional stimulation. She attempted to recast history — art’s, the country’s, her own — from her position as a Black woman. Amos did not just want a seat at the table; she wanted to remake the table itself.