The Gift: Emma Amos with Friends

Before they were household names, Maya Angelou, Lorraine Hansberry, Abbey Lincoln, Miriam Makeba, and Nina Simone needed a place to practice and perform. That place was the 

An exploration Emma Amos’s ambitious portraiture projectThe Gift, celebrating its enduring legacy and contemporary importance

American artist Emma Amos originally created The Gift(1990–94) as a birthday present for her daughter. However, this dazzling collection of portraits that honors creative kinship among women speaks to a much larger audience. A groundbreaking artist, Amos worked across the mediums of paint, print, and textile to celebrate the lives of women, especially Black women. Inspired by a book proposal that Amos herself drafted,Emma Amos: Among Friends contextualizesThe Gift and explores its legacy.

Rooted in Amos’s own creative community in New York City,The Gift is composed of forty-eight watercolor portraits of artists, writers, and curators, including Elizabeth Catlett, Anna Deavere Smith, and Faith Ringgold. To great effect, the vast grid of faces, each slightly larger than life, projects the force of its subjects. With essays by a new generation of scholars, a historic interview of Amos by bell hooks, and a roundtable conversation among notable contemporary artists, including Jordan Casteel, Aliza Nizenbaum, and Amy Sherald, this publication reflects on the intersections of portraiture and community and honors the power of Amos’s work.

Author:Emily Liebert

Contributor(s):Gabriella Shypula, Jordan Casteel, Rhea L. Combs , Carmen Hermo , bell hooks , Nontsikelelo Mutiti , Aliza Nisenbaum , Amy Sherald

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Hardcover, The Cleveland Museum of Art, October 2026
160 p, 9.7 × 12.2 in.