Emma Amos ‘The Gift’ on view at Cleveland Museum of Art
The Gift: Emma Amos with Friends displays Emma Amos’s monumental portrait series The Gift (1990–94). Acquired by the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2023, this suite of 48 watercolor portraits, painted from life, depicts women artists, writers, and curators in Amos’s intergenerational community. Ranging from renowned figures—Elizabeth Catlett, Anna Deavere Smith, bell hooks, Lucy R. Lippard, Howardena Pindell, Faith Ringgold, Lorna Simpson, and Kay WalkingStick—to lesser-known individuals, the evocative paintings in The Gift are united in a vast grid whose scale radiates the force of its subjects.
This exhibition marks the first time The Gift has been displayed since 2013. Visitors can view The Gift: Emma Amos with Friends free of charge from Sunday, September 13, 2026, through Sunday, January 24, 2027, in the Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Galleries.
“The Gift is not possible to negate,” Amos stated. “Those women are too powerful to ignore.”
Alongside The Gift, earlier portraits by Amos in the CMA’s collection as well as the artist’s own notebook, manuscripts, and film footage documenting The Gift’s production highlight how kinship—biological and elected—was an enduring motivation for her art. The exhibition also features selected loaned works that further contextualize The Gift within the artist’s decades-long practice.
Made as a birthday present for her daughter, India, The Gift animates the importance of creative community as a source of strength, support, and inspiration, which Amos learned from her own mother.
Amos painted the portraits in The Gift over a four-year period from 1990 to 1994. Her subjects, who range in age, race, and ethnicity, would come to her studio and sit for 45 minutes to an hour.
While she painted, Amos noted, “the sitter and I would discuss juggling jobs and careers, art making, success, having or not having babies, and the effect of jobs, boyfriends, girlfriends, college, and other choices on children as they grow to adulthood.”
To complete The Gift, Amos also included portraits of herself and her daughter India, underscoring their place within this creative community and shared family.
“Friendship, it seems, was lived through the making of The Gift. And watercolor, a highly unusual medium for Amos, was just right for capturing the immediacy of these dynamic encounters between artist and sitter,” said Emily Liebert, Lauren Rich Fine Curator of Contemporary Art and Chair of Art of the Americas and Modern and Contemporary Art. “The Gift brings to life the power of kinship and collectivity.”
About the Cleveland Museum of Art
The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) is renowned for the quality and breadth of its collection, which includes more than 68,000 artworks and spans 6,000 years of achievement in the arts. The museum is a significant international forum for exhibitions, scholarship, and performing arts and is a leader in digital innovation. One of the leading encyclopedic art museums in the United States, the CMA is recognized for its award-winning open access program—which provides free digital access to images and information about works in the museum’s collection—and free of charge to all.
The museum is located in the University Circle neighborhood with two satellite locations on Cleveland’s west side: the Community Arts Center and Transformer Station.
