Emma Amos

This print depicts the ill-fated heroine of Cole Porter’s 1934 song “Miss Otis Regrets,” who is lynched by an angry mob after being arrested for shooting her former lover. The work’s bright colors belie Miss Otis’s violent end, foreshadowed by the abstracted jail bars and the coming horde’s disembodied eyes and lips. Amos’s portrayal of Miss Otis treads the line between propriety and what the artist has termed “sass.”

Though presented in Porter’s song as a society woman, Miss Otis is not impervious to systemic racial violence. The assertive, resilient expression of Amos’s Miss Otis reflects the artist’s ongoing attempt to disrupt, in her words, “assumptions about skin color and the privileges of power and of whiteness.”