EMMA AMOS (1937 - 2020)
Untitled (Topsy or Curly).

Screenprint on velvet with fabric border, 2001. 431x457 mm; 17x18 inches. Edition of 6.

Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; private collection, New York (2013).

This print serveed as a maquette for Curly Topsy and Topsy Curly, 2001, a diptych of wall hangings that Amos produced. They were later exhibited at Flomenhaft Gallery in New York in 2010.

Untitled (Topsy or Curly) was likely inspired by the folk tradition of Topsy-Turvy dolls that originated in the antebellum South and remained popular through the mid-20th century. These two-in-one dolls always hid one figure while the other was visible and frequently paired white girls in pigtails with Black “mammies” wearing headscarves. The fraught history of the Topsy-Turvy doll may have informed Amos’s diptych, where acrobatic power dynamics are mapped onto racial differences.