[5] Amos studied at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, at the Central School of Art and Design in London and at New York University.

Her fourth year at Antioch, she went to England and studied at the London Central School of Art, where she learned to print and etch under Anthony Harrison, and began to paint with oils, which she had not done before.

[10] Despite the difficulty African Americans face in entering the art scene, as there is often a lack of access to dealers and curators, Amos persevered and received her M.A.

The group was a collective of approximately fifteen prominent African American artists, founded in 1963 by Romare Bearden, Charles Alston, Norman Lewis, and Hale Woodruff.

The group was interested in discussions of Négritude, a philosophy born out of opposition to French colonialism and centered around encouraging a common racial identity for black Africans around the world.

This etching was a nude self-portrait bust that depicted Amos "staring indifferently at the viewer from behind a pair of dark sunglasses.

[13] Amos designed the memorial for Ralph David Abernathy a civil rights leader and activist, which is made up of four installations and is located in the Ralph David Abernathy Memorial Park in Atlanta, GA.[14] Her piece Measuring Measuring (1995)[15] was used as the front cover image for the African American women artists historical text, Creating Their Own Image: The History of the African American Women Artists by Lisa E.

She borrowed schema, subject matter and symbols from European art while pictorially quoting artists like Paul Gauguin, Malcolm Morley, Lucian Freud, and Henri Matisse.

"[13] As well as bordering her paintings with African fabric, Amos sewed, appliqued, embroidered and occasionally quilted with her own weavings, Kente cloth and batiks.

Amos is quintessentially postmodern because she questions the validity of canonical traditions and institutions that for so long have been biased against the inclusion of women and artists of color, especially blacks.

[11] Before this time, in the early 1970s, while raising children, Amos was invited to join a Feminist Group of artists that met in New York City parks.

When choosing whether or not to attend, Amos stated, "From what I heard of feminist discussions in the park, the experiences of black women of any class were left out.

"[7] It was not until the early 1980s, after she began teaching at Mason Gross of Arts at Rutgers University in New Jersey where she decided to participate in the feminist group Heresies.

[21] Emma Amos was also a member of the anonymous feminist group Guerilla Girls and used the pseudonym Zora Neale Hurston.

This group also explored the artwork and writings of many female artists, but also focused on how the revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, concerning education on racism and sexism, failed to actually make any difference for black Americans or women.

[7] Amos stayed active in her involvement in these issues and providing education to younger generations, however, keeping groups going seemed to her to be the hardest challenge.

[25][26] In 2021, Emma Amos: Color Odyssey, a retrospective of her work organized by Shawnya Harris, opened at Georgia Museum of Art before traveling.