Joyce J. Scott is an African American artist whose mixed-media (and often wearable) work utilizes the grotesque and horror to comment on sexual and racial violence against Black women. Much of her work is a “lexicon of liberation” created in response to the ways in which “human ingenuity and genius have devised all kinds of horrible things and implements of torture, abuse, and pain.”[1] Her concentration on violence against Black women’s bodies is an output of her belief that Black women are specifically targeted through racialized sexual violence because they are the central uniting force in the community. Scott explains, “A lot of times I tackle subjects like murder because I am trying to figure out how to do that in a way that captures the tragedy, but also shows the aesthetic nature of my technique and materials. And because it is a subject that is so present for me every day. It also allows the person who’s wearing the piece to talk about the issues it is dealing with, because people will come up to them and ask what it’s about.”[2]
Scott was born in Baltimore in 1948 and began making fabric art when she was as young as five years old with her mother, the fiber artist Elizabeth Talford Scott. She earned a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore in 1970 and an MFA from the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, in 1971. In 1976 she studied at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine, where she learned beadwork traditions with Indigenous and African artists. Her work blends Indigenous Yoruba, Mexican, Czech, and Russian beadwork traditions. She explains, “I see myself as paying homage to bead workers around the world, because I’m working with a technique and materials that have an ancient history and that have been handed down from the beginning of time.”[3] Scott taught at Penland School of Craft in North Carolina and had a residency at the Berengo glass studio in Murano, Italy, in 2011 and 2012. She recounted of the residency, “It was an amazing time for me and really made me happy to go back a second year.”[4]
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Notes
[1] Scott, quoted in Bernier 2018, 260.
[2] Scott, quoted in Sims and Scott 2018, 159.
[3] Scott, quoted in Sims and Scott 2018, 159.
[4] Scott, quoted in Sims and Scott 2018, 160.
References
Bernier, Celeste-Marie. 2018. “Hurting to Death.” In Stick to the Skin: African American and Black British Art, 1965–2015, 243–64. Oakland: University of California Press.
Cassel Oliver, Valerie, et al. 2021. “Artist Biographies.” In The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, 238–62. Exh. cat. Richmond: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Sims, Lowery Stokes. 2014. “Joyce J. Scott: Evolution in Glass.” In Maryland to Murano: Neckpieces & Sculptures, 10–12. Exh. cat. New York: Museum of Arts and Design.
Sims, Lowery Stokes, et al. 2015. “Spirituality.” In Common Wealth: Art by African Americans in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 152–73. Boston: MFA Publications.
Sims, Lowery Stokes, and Joyce Scott. 2018. “Joyce J. Scott in Conversation with Lowery Stokes Sims.” In Joyce J. Scott: Harriet Tubman and Other Truths, by Sims, Patterson Sims, and Seph Rodney, 156–63. Exh. cat. Hamilton, NJ: Grounds for Sculpture.
Stankard, Paul. 2016. “Joyce J. Scott.” In Studio Craft as Career: A Guide to Achieving Excellence in Art-Making, 188-89. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing.
Strauss, Cindi, Janet Koplos, and Susie J. Silbert. 2014. “Featured Works.” In Beyond Craft: Decorative Arts from the Leatrice S. and Melvin B. Eagle Collection, 35–140. Exh. cat. Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Wilkinson, Michelle Joan. 2011. “Joyce J. Scott.” In Material Girls: Contemporary Black Women Artists, 30–31. Exh. cat. Baltimore: Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture.
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