The Gift

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

American artist Emma Amos (1937–2020) 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 contextualizes The 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, as well as other lesser-known women. 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.

Distributed for the Cleveland Museum of Art

Exhibition schedule:

The Cleveland Museum of Art

(September 13, 2026–January 17, 2027)