The Bow #2

Amalia Amaki is a distinguished artist, curator, and art historian whose practice revolves around the art and history of the African diaspora. As an artist, she specializes in the medium of collage, combining found photographs of black men, women and children with a variety of everyday materials, such as buttons, beads, and pearls, which she arranges into striking patterns. Amaki’s works present moments of intimacy, friendship, and sociability among African Americans at the same time that they comment incisively on race and history as well as the politics of visual culture and self-fashioning. This particular collage features a photograph based on a vintage postcard, part of a larger set produced for the Nouveau Cirque in Paris around 1900. The buttons that embellish the photograph are invested with symbolic, cultural, and historical importance specific to African American communities such as the one in which Amaki was raised. There buttons are prized for their beauty and their usefulness: they are kept, recycled, collected, and handed down. Their importance dates back to the era of slavery, when wearing clothes with buttons was considered a sign of prestige. Buttons have even been found on the grave sites of African and African American slaves. Amaki’s practice of reusing existing materials draws inspiration from the culture of making-do that formed part of her own family history as well as the history of other African American communities in the American South.