Emilio Amero was one of the central figures of the first generation of Mexican modernists, a working contemporary of Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco who transformed himself across a long career into a pioneering teacher of lithography in both Mexico and the United States, and an artistic ambassador of the Mexican Renaissance to two generations of American printmakers.
Emilio Amero (1901, Ixtlahuaca, Mexico – 1976, Norman, Oklahoma) was a Mexican-born painter, muralist, lithographer, photographer, filmmaker, and educator, and a member of the first generation of Mexican Renaissance artists who reshaped twentieth-century Latin American art. He moved with his family from his birthplace in the State of Mexico to Mexico City in 1909, attended primary school alongside Rufino Tamayo, and studied at the Escuela al Aire Libre de Santa Anita Zacatlamanco and the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes. He was among the first group of muralists commissioned by the post-Revolutionary government, painted frescoes for the Secretaría de Educación Pública, and assisted José Clemente Orozco on the murals of the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria.
He left Mexico in 1925 for a year in Cuba and then nearly a decade in New York, returning to Mexico City in 1930 to establish a lithography workshop at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes that drew an extraordinary roster of students, Jean Charlot, Olga Costa, Carlos Mérida, José Chávez Morado, Alfredo Zalce, Gabriel Fernández Ledesma, Francisco Dosamantes, and Francisco Díaz de León among them. In 1940 he moved to Seattle to teach at the Cornish School, and in 1946 took up a professorship at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, where he ran a leading American print workshop until his retirement in the late 1960s. His work is held in the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, and other major American and Mexican collections.