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An artist friend of mine

Art Journal, Winter, 1999 by Emma Amos

An artist friend of mine remarked to me that she hated the question, Which is worse, being black or being female? Aside from the question's ubiquitous dumbness, she had never not been both, so how could she tell? Besides, the answer is in the question itself: they are both limiting. Though I am told that many black women eschew feminism, I do not think I know any who will admit that they do. (By the way, I have no use for the term African-American, even if it does slip out of my mouth on occasion. Being parts African, Cherokee, Irish, Norwegian, and God knows what else, I refuse to cede the high status of being unhyphenated American to people who hide their hyphens behind whiteness or those who came to these shores way after my ancestors did.)

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In 1961, when I moved to New York City from Atlanta by way of college in Ohio and art school in London, I was sure that I was prepared for anything. But I was surprised by the hidden racism, sexism, and ageism that greeted me as I showed my work to galleries and tried to find a studio teaching job. It was suggested that only mature artists could teach, and that I was too young to show. (Now, younger artists have more of an edge, if not the edge.) I eventually took a job at the Dalton School, where I made friends with artists who introduced me to my future husband and to the New York and Easthampton art scene. I shortly began to understand it was a man's scene, black or white. After a year, I began a career as a textile designer, working for the great weaver and colorist, Dorothy Liebes, who showed me how much energy it takes to be a success in a world of male power.

After returning to school to get yet another degree, I discovered Hale Woodruff, the New York University professor who had been a friend of my family while he was teaching and making murals at Atlanta University. He borrowed some of my work to show to a group of his friends, and I was invited to join them. The fifteen members of Spiral, all black men (except for me), included Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, Charles Alston, Merton Simpson, and Richard Mayhew. I imagined that I might be expected to take notes and make coffee, but I never did. For the next two years--from 1964 when I joined, to 1966 when we stopped meeting regularly--we talked of Leopold Senghor's conference in Paris on Negritude, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and the exploding Civil Rights struggle. Pipsqueak though I was, I argued in every discussion, except those that were about their tiresome old rivalries.

I was pleased and honored to be the token woman at Spiral, though I thought it was fishy that the group had not asked Vivian Browne, Betty Blayton Taylor, Faith Ringgold, Norma Morgan, or the other women artists of their acquaintance to join. I figured that I probably seemed less threatening to their egos, as I was not yet of much consequence.

In the early 1970s when my children were toddlers, I was asked to come to meetings of a group of other Village artist/NYU park-sitting mothers. But I did not, because I could not imagine discussing male/female power issues with women whose mothers, I assumed, had been Donna Reed homemakers. I was very proud that my grandmother, Emma, had a college degree and was teaching in Atlanta by the early 1890s. My mother, India, graduated from college in 1931 as an anthropology major and managed the family drugstore. From what I heard of feminist discussions in the park, the experiences of black women of any class were left out. I came from a line of working women who were not only mothers, but breadwinners, cultured, educated, and who had been treated as equals by their black husbands. I felt I could not afford to spend precious time away from studio and family to listen to stories so far removed from my own.

When my children were older and I had become a professor at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, I became a contributor and then a member of the editorial collective of Heresies. This was the group I had always hoped existed: serious, knowledgeable, take-care-of-business feminists giving time to publish the art and writings of women. Besides my sponsor, Lucy Lippard, the collective included Elizabeth Hess, Avis Lang, Ellen Lanyon, Josely Carvalho, and Sabra Moore, among others.

The question of the white liberal northern understanding of class, race, and the privileges of whiteness intrigued a group of women brought together by the art historian Eunice Lipton. I began to meet with this group, Fantastic Women in the Arts, in the late 1980s. For several years we came together to read, to see art, and to discuss why the education, learning, and civil rights actions of the sixties and seventies that should have caused racism and sexism to abate had not done so. But the group kept attracting new people who had not done the reading and could never seem to catch up with what members had learned from past discussions of shows, readings, and each other.

At about the same time, WAC (Women's Action Coalition), the vigorous and excitable feminist action group, had started to meet. For the nonwhite women asked to join WAC (in what seemed to be an afterthought), the group never met its promise. It made a few good "actions" but caused some hard feelings before it wore itself out. The most successful feminist group, the Guerrilla Girls, has done more since it began in the eighties than the large and unwieldy WAC ever managed to accomplish. Perhaps anonymity allowed the Girls to get their work done. Entitled: Black Women Artists, a large new group of fine artists in the Northeast, started meeting a few years ago. Goals, strategy, leadership struggles, money, time to participate, and places to meet are the tough internal issues for all groups.

An artist friend of mine

Art Journal, Winter, 1999 by Emma Amos

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