woman with bobbed hair wearing black robe over Wonder Woman costume, walking on a tightrope; yellow bottom section with eyes (painted and collage); woman holds paintbrushes in one hand and a shirt on a hanger, with bare breasts and hand holding an abstracted bowl of red fruit on front; images in corners of Gauguin painting of woman with bowl of fruit; cloth borders with African printed motifs

Tightrope, 1994

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The work Tightrope (1994), a late masterpiece of Amos’ oeuvre, presents an almost life-size portrait of the artist balancing precariously on a tightrope above a crowd of blurred faces and a net of glaring, disembodied eyes. Wearing a Wonder Woman costume and a painter’s smock, Amos steadies herself with paintbrushes in one hand, and a T-shirt emblazoned with a nude torso in the other. The T-shirt bears a detail of Paul Gauguin’s 1899 portrayal of his teenage Tahitian mistress Teha’amana from the painting Two Tahitian Women. Here, Amos borrows a figure from the work of a celebrated European master to disembody it and render it strange. Tightrope looks to Gauguin as an artist who frequently viewed women of color not as individuals with their own subjectivities, but as objects of representation and sexual desire. However, Amos’s appropriation of Gauguin is not simply an indictment of the colonial gaze and the chauvinism of “great” white male artists, but a complex positioning of self vis-à-vis the problematic history of European art.

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Details
Title
Tightrope
Artist Life
1938 - 2020
Role
Artist
Accession Number
2020.43
Curator Approved

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woman with bobbed hair wearing black robe over Wonder Woman costume, walking on a tightrope; yellow bottom section with eyes (painted and collage); woman holds paintbrushes in one hand and a shirt on a hanger, with bare breasts and hand holding an abstracted bowl of red fruit on front; images in corners of Gauguin painting of woman with bowl of fruit; cloth borders with African printed motifs
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