The Overseer, c. 1992 Acrylic on canvas with photo transfer, hand-woven fabric, and African fabric borders Triptych, overall: 84 x 168 inches (213.4 x 426.7 cm)
Charting in her early work the social construction of the artist’s identity in relation to the private world of kin and family, of loved ones chosen outside the realm of the familiar, in her new work Amos interrogates from the space of the unknown, the unfamiliar, the dangerous. Placing her own image in paintings and prints that depict a world where she could never “belong,” Amos resists objectification and subordination. Subversively announcing her subjectivity via the imaginative appropriation of the space of power occupied by white males, she emerges from the shadows to call attention to subjugated knowledge. In the painting The Overseer, she links repressive white supremacy to attempts to control and define images of whiteness and blackness. — bell hooks, Art on My Mind, 1995
Exhibited at Art in General’s Changing the Subject: Painting and Prints 1992-1994 (1994), traveling to the Montclair Art Museum (1994) 36