Preparing for a Face Lift, 1981

Emma Amos's work titled “Preparing for a Face Lift” was made in 1981 and featured in the exhibition Georgia O'Keeffe: Living Modern in the Brooklyn Museum. This piece touches on relevant societal issues like racism, sexism, and cultural expectations for women's beauty. Amos etches an image of an African American woman, annotating the focal points and details of her face. The emphasized features are tied to typical signs of aging and/or that go against conventional beauty standards. The artwork criticizes this individual for how she measures up to many of the ‘feminine ideals’ of the patriarchy to demonstrate the overwhelming pressure for women to portray an unfair, unobtainable, and out of reach standard. The artist draws connections between the external body and internal mind in relation to the discourses surrounding topics of second wave feminism in the early 1980s – soon to transition into the third wave feminism movement that continues into today.

The artwork appears to be a map of sorts in that it uses text, line direction, and shape to highlight important areas and guide the viewer's gaze across the work. Even the process itself of etching with a medium like crayon onto paper shows similarity to early mapmakers who used rougher, handheld materials to draw their work. This quality allows Amos to share her message with control over what the viewer puts attention to and the path with which the viewer analyzes the material. It shapes the experience to be less about admiring aesthetics and more about educating and mapping out the body's physical landscape from the alluded to effects of its external circumstances and social landscape.