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(b Atlanta, GA, Mar 16, 1937; d Bedford, NH, May 20, 2020).

American painter, printmaker, and weaver. Born in segregated Atlanta, GA, Emma Amos grew up in an upper-middle-class family with connections to influential Black figures including W. E. B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston. At age sixteen, she had exhibited her work at Atlanta University and enrolled in a five-year BFA program at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, OH (1953–1958). She went on to study etching, painting, and weaving at the Central School of Art, London (1958–1959) where she began creating gestural abstractions, experimenting with color, brushwork, and space to evoke specific places (e.g., Shepherd’s Path, 1958). In 1960 Amos moved to New York, where she worked as a rug designer for Dorothy Liebes, an art instructor. Simultaneously, she advanced her printmaking at two printmaking workshops: Robert Blackburn’s and Letterio Calapai’s (an outpost of Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17). Amos completed her MA at New York University (NYU) in ...

Native American (Eastern Band of Cherokee), 20th–21st century, female.

Born 1957, in Baltimore.

Multimedia artist, photographer, illustrator, basket-weaver with paper.

Shan Goshorn, given the Cherokee Wolf Clan name of Yellow Moon, began training in silversmithing at the Cleveland Institute of Art and transferred to the Atlanta College of Art for her final year, receiving a BFA degree in painting and photography (double major) in ...

Native American (Tongva-Acjachemen), 20th–21st century, female.

Born 1952, in California.

Painter, writer, tribal scholar, cartoonist, basket weaver, illustrator, indigenous language activist.

As cofounder of Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival, L. Frank Manriquez, a California Indian artist and activist, has become particularly associated with the movement for language revitalisation and recovery of indigenous knowledge in the state. A multi-talented figure with a gift for humour, especially in her cartoon works, she has exhibited nationally and internationally, and is a board member of the Cultural Conservancy, supporting indigenous rights, self-determination and the protection of native lands. She also makes and teaches about baskets and is a board member of the California Indian Basketweavers Association. As the author of ...

Canadian First Nations (Inuit, Utkusiksalingmiut), 20th century, female.

Born 1906, in Back River region (Nunavut); died 2 March 1985, in Baker Lake (Nunavut).

Textile artist, draughtsman, printmaker, graphic artist.

Inuit art.

For the first four decades of her life, Jessie Oonark lived on the land, first with her parents Killivuk (mother) and Aglaquark (father), and later with her husband, Quablunaaq. A few years after Quablunaaq’s death in ...

Abbreviation for ‘optical art’, referring to painting, prints, sculpture, and textiles exploiting the optical effects of visual perception. The term entered American art vocabulary in 1964, referring especially to two-dimensional structures with strong psychophysiological effects. The reasons for these effects had been explained in three 19th-century treatises: Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Zur Farbenlehre (The Theory of Colors; 1810); Michel-Eugène Chevreul’s De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs (Simultaneous Contrast of Colors; 1839); and Hermann von Helmholtz’s Physiologische Optik (Physiological Optics; 1855–66).

See also Op art.

Painting was transformed after the mid-19th century, once artists understood the three-receptor theory of vision, and how the mind—not the eye—creates colour. The optical experiences in Op art include after-images, line interference, reversible perspective, chromatic vibration, ambiguous forms, and sculptural superimpositions. Op art awakens questions in the viewer concerning the perceptive processes: ‘As we stand before Op paintings that resist our understanding, we introduce ourselves to our unconscious selves’ (exh. cat. ...

American, 20th century, female.

Born in Selma (Alabama); died 1925, in New York.

Painter, engraver.

Clara Weaver Parrish was a pupil of William M. Chase, Henry S. Mowbray, Cox, Julian Adlen Weir and Collin.

( Claire )

(b Chicago, March 7, 1918; Los Angeles, Aug 23, 2011).

American painter, printmaker, tapestry designer, writer and lecturer. She left school at 15 to become a painter, using her given names, June Claire, but her reputation was made after her marriage, when she became June Wayne. Her first exhibition, in 1935, of watercolours based on Ben Day dots, took place a quarter of a century before the birth of Pop art and won her an official invitation to Mexico. Pursuing a rich diversity of ideas, fashionable and unfashionable, she often anticipated aesthetic developments. For example, her spatial constructions of 1950—ink drawings on glass slotted into a framework—predated Rauschenberg’s by 14 years, while the imagery of her lithograph Strange Moon (1951; see Gilmour, no. 12)—an expanded chequer-board traversed by floating discs—preceded Op art by a decade. Her lithographic illumination (1958) of John Donne’s Songs and Sonets was among the first books in the French livre de peintre...

[née Thompson]

(b Santa Rosa, CA, Sept 25, 1887; d New York, June 27, 1968).

American painter, textile artist, and printmaker. She represents an early modernist who applied Cubism and German Expressionist approaches to both painting and textile design. In Paris from 1908 to1911 she studied with Jacques-Emile Blanche and J. D. Fergusson at the Académie de la Palette, a small modernist school where she met William Zorach. She was especially inspired by German Expressionist painters and Henri Matisse, whose work she encountered in avant-garde circles. Travelling in Belgium, Spain, Germany, and France with Jessica Dismorr (later an English Vorticist), Zorach created a few etchings and painted landscapes with agitated brush strokes, Expressionist colour, and blue outlines in the manner of Whistler. She exhibited with the American Women’s Art Association (1910), and in 1911 at the Salon de la Société des Artistes Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne in Paris. Dismorr and Thompson contributed abstracted pen-and-ink figure drawings to the English avant-garde publication Rhythm...