b. 1948
Joyce C. Scott is a Baltimore-based sculptor, printmaker, performance artist, glass worker, and jewelry designer. But it is beadwork with which she has a special kinship. “I insinuate beads into anything.” In the 1970s Scott crafted one-of-a-kind garments and made figurative jewelry and abstract sculpture decorated with her beadwork. Her sculptures combined glasswork and found objects with beadwork.
Scott has lived in her West Baltimore home for more than 40 years. Her parents were sharecroppers from the South who came to Baltimore during the Great Migration. Her mother’s side of the family were crafts people, and her mother, Elizabeth Talford Scott, is an artist and master quilter whose work is being shown at museums and colleges in Baltimore and at the Baltimore Museum of Art as a companion exhibition with her daughter’s work. Scott’s mother installed in her a strong sense of self-awareness and self-assuredness. Scott always hears her mother tell her, “‘You’re worthy. And if you want it, go get it. Never Stop’.”
Scott feels a sense of responsibility to the city of Baltimore. “Any postindustrial city is having trials about race, economics, and class . . . If art is part of social justice, we artists will keep doing what we’re doing. It’s not only good for the artist but for the entire community.” Her art has always reflected her sense of social justice as in her 2008 “Head Shot” which depicts a hollow glass hand gripping a gun with a beaded head balanced on its barrel. The hand is full of real bullets and the figure has lost the top of its skull.
Her 2009 “Day After Rape Series: Gathering Water” is made with a pair of tobacco pipes joined together by beadwork showing a woman’s naked but headless body. This work refers to the murder of women during the conflict in Darfur.
Scott was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2016. She had her first solo show in 20 years in New York at the Peter Blum Gallery. “Harriet Tubman and Other Truths,” her most comprehensive exhibition, is a survey of more than 50 works from the last 45 years along with new works based on Harriet Tubman. Currently the Baltimore Museum of Art is having a summative career 50-year retrospective of her work, “Walk a Mile in My Dreams.”
Her work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Museum of Arts and Design, Corning Museum of Glass, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Houston’s The Museum of Fine Arts, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and others.
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