The woman in Emma Amos's famous painting Flower Sniffer (1966) looks at the viewer skeptically, almost as if she feels guilty being caught holding and sniffing, maybe arranging, the cut flowers. Her neck is bent forward in an exaggerated way, making herself smaller in what seems like a submissive gesture, but her gaze is powerful: the viewer might have caught her sniffing, but this is her moment. In a composition that borrows from classic painting, the woman, the “flower sniffer,” is framed by a window. She is in a private space—maybe her own space—but everything seems slightly off-center: the white paint framing the figure is thick and the figure is positioned low in the frame.

Emma Amos's painting from 1966 of a Black woman sniffing flowers in a domestic scene evokes histories of representation of women and flowers associated with the private, and with domesticity, fragility, and the patriarchal order. The submissive posture and the subversive gaze of the woman depicted, however, create new relations between the figure and the flowers, the figure and the space she is in, and the figure and the viewer who “catches” her in the act as she defiantly looks back. She is having an intimate, sensual experience of smelling, touching, and looking at the flowers. In what is assumed to be a self-portrait of Amos, critics see a Black woman's claim to space and to be taken seriously in the predominantly white and male art scene of the mid-twentieth century.

The fact that the figure in the painting is holding and smelling flowers is crucial for understanding the painting's power and its interventions. In that sense, the flowers tell a story: they speak of gender, race, history, domesticity, and representation. The flowers are the woman's co-conspirators; they offer her sensual pleasure and she offers them care. The interventions of Amos's painting are multiple, but they clearly align with the previous chapter of this book, as they point to ways in which art uses overly coded symbols, such as flowers, femininity, and race, to shift and question meanings.