The Gift: Emma Amos with Friends

In 2023, the Cleveland Museum of Art acquired The Gift (1990–94), a monumental portrait series by Emma Amos (American, 1937–2020). Opening in September, a new exhibition, The Gift: Emma Amos with Friends, marks this work’s debut presentation on our walls. 

Amos was an artist and educator whose paintings, prints, and textiles celebrate her creative community. In 1960, Amos moved to New York City, where she worked for textile designer Dorothy Liebes (American, 1897–1972) while attending New York University, earning her master’s degree in art education in 1965. During this period, Amos explored how color conveys social and political meaning through Spiral—a Black art collective of which she was the only woman member. This laid the foundation for her vibrant portraits of women of color, including friends, family, and herself.

Created as a birthday present for the artist’s daughter, India, The Gift comprises 48 portraits of women artists, writers, and curators who range in age, race, and degrees of renown—including India and Amos themselves. Enveloping the viewer, The Gift’s large scale projects the force of its subjects. “Those women are too powerful to ignore,” Amos observed.¹

Amos painted the portraits in The Gift over a four-year period. She welcomed her subjects to her studio, where portrait sessions lasted for about an hour. While she painted, Amos noted, “the sitter and I would discuss juggling jobs and careers, art making, success, having or not having babies, and the effect of jobs, boyfriends, girlfriends, college, and other choices on children as they grow to adulthood.”² Friendship, it seems, was lived through the making of The Gift. And watercolor, an unusual medium for Amos, was just right for capturing the immediacy of these encounters between artist and sitter.

The Gift joins two other works by Amos in the CMA’s collection: the painting Sandy and Her Husband (1973) and the print Without Feather Boa (1965), both of which are on view in this exhibition. In fact, it was through researching Sandy and Her Husband, in preparation for the painting’s acquisition in 2018, that Emily Liebert, the CMA’s Lauren Rich Fine Curator of Contemporary Art, first learned about The Gift. 

Liebert was immediately struck by the work’s role as an archive: Through its content, The Gift documents a consequential artistic milieu. She was further moved by the artistic motivation behind the work: Conceiving The Gift as a birthday present for her daughter, Amos wanted to make vivid to India the sustaining force of women’s kinship beyond biological family. The artist learned this lesson from her own mother (for whom India is named). 

It was not until 2023, when The Gift became available for acquisition from Amos’s estate, that Liebert had a chance to see the work in person. This was when she experienced the work’s visual and physical impact. She saw up close the way The Gift’s medium of watercolor endows the work with fresh and buzzing energy. As she held the portraits in her hand—each slightly larger than life—Liebert could envision the powerful effect of the total work on a viewer enveloped by all 48 portraits. 

It was always Amos’s intention for The Gift—and its sitters—to gain widespread exposure. Now that the CMA is the work’s custodian, the museum is honored to support the artist’s objective. The Gift: Emma Amos with Friends introduces audiences to this work while revealing the context for The Gift’s production and its legacies in Amos’s artistic practice. Through Amos’s art, as well as selected archives, visitors see that kinship—
biological and chosen—was an enduring motivation throughout the six decades of her career.

Among the archival materials displayed in this exhibition is a one-page single-spaced typed proposal for a publication based on The Gift, which Amos drafted the year before she completed the work. Unrealized during the artist’s lifetime, this proposal has offered inspiration for the catalogue accompanying The Gift: Emma Amos with Friends. This publication brings together new scholarship, historical material, and the voices of contemporary artists who animate Amos’s tribute to a creative community, demonstrating its enduring relevance for the times in which we live.