Painter, printmaker and weaver Emma Amos was born in 1938 and grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, where she attended segregated public schools. On a BA programme at Antioch University, Ohio, she studied at the Central St Martin’s College of Art, London, where she also completed a diploma in etching in 1959. She later worked in Leo Calapai’s New York atelier and Bob Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop. Amos’s first solo exhibition was in the New Arts Gallery, Atlanta, in 1960. That same year she moved to New York, in 1961 she was hired by Dorothy Wright Liebes as a rug designer/ weaver. In 1964 Hale Woodruff invited Amos to become a member of Spiral, a group of black artists including Romare Bearden and Norman Lewis, who met to discuss civil rights issues and the plight of blacks in America. Spiral’s First Group Showing was subtitled Works in Black and White. Bearden had suggested the exhibition’s black-and-white theme because it addressed both socio-political and formal concerns. Amos was the youngest, and only female, member of the group.