Joyce J. Scott

Joyce J. Scott

Exhibition: Dec 5, 1996 – Jan 12, 1997


Joyce Scott is an artist who adores to work. Her love of labor—whether in drawing and sculpting, making jewelry, or performing—defies hierarchical conceptions of art that tend to value concept over making, idea over use, or “pure” over practical. Respectful of the joys of designing and crafting, Scott’s oeuvre, in diverse media, engages process as well as product. Be it a sculpture, a pendant, or an acting-out piece, her work raises issues and poses questions regarding the object, its function, and context. Blessed with a familial lineage of craft and industry as well as storytelling, Scott’s artistic trajectory is characterized by a celebration and innovation of tradition and narrative. Her parents and grandfather, an ex-slave, after long days of work would make things skillfully based on their knowledge of basket-weaving, caning, black-smithing, and cotton spinning, as they told stories all the while. Underpinning her oeuvre are themes and concerns that relate dynamically with representation, perception, and subjective agency. Redeemed from marginality, techniques and forms that are grounded in African-American history are the means by which Scott expresses contemporary experiences that go beyond issues of identity to address art, knowledge, and power. While her familiarity with cultural location and specific histories that have marked her as a woman and artist are crucial to understand her work, Scott is an African-American dealing with vital contemporary issues that are global.

The medium Scott most favors for her visual narratives is the bead. Beads are marvelous; they are sparkling, inexpensive mysteries that connect the artist to the past. Beading gives Scott a sense of personal quest and history, since beads were the materials traded for her people in Africa and in the New World. Each bead is a wonder, a triggering device for memory as well as a fetish. As fetishes, beads and objects made with them are layered with energies and desires: they are objects of projection. Beads are an integral part of ritual and prayer as well as practical counting devices and jewels that signify displaced desire. In all instances, when handled and/or worn next to the skin, or even in her large-scale public art work executed for Charleston-Spoleto (1992), beads have a texture, a feel that one doesn’t forget. Tactility and performative gestures of the labor of love involved are related: each bead and motion is linked not only to the past, but more so to the pure present of the act. Revelation takes place in the “here and now” and not “afterwards” as a result of sacrifice.

All that cannot be resolved visually Scott “acts-out” in her performances, which she calls squiggles, a term that refers to drawing in space with her voice and body. In a humorous, bitter-sweet fashion, Scott deconstructs stereotypes of an artistic, cultural, and social nature to challenge and create awareness in her audience. Just as in her beading, Scott connects with a social yet profoundly personal past and present in her acting-out. She draws from herself, and more often than not, she is the butt of her own humor. Drawing from the constructs of genetics, civil rights struggles and legislation, traditional narratives, and what she refers to as “primal and spiritual impulses,” Scott enacts in her performances contemporary paradoxes and parables that address the precariousness of life as well as its wonders.

At Artpace, Scott has been able to have the opportunity to experiment and finish a body of work. Along with her community-focused performances, Scott was able to work in a space that permitted an engagement with sculptural techniques and forms. Welding as well as glass-shaping with flame have yielded an artistic corpus dealing with design principles and the dynamics of light and space. Conceiving her sculptures as bearers of light in a dynamic space, Scott has had the freedom to realize operations that combine concept and chance. Beading and glass-shaping on diverse support surfaces enable the materials to flow and the object to occupy space in a polyvalent manner. The objects portraying diverse figures or evoking less representational imagery absorb, layer, bounce back, and generate plays of light. Some appear to be executed more spontaneously than others; upon close examination, the materials are worked in a sly and intriguing fashion. In this sense, her works—thematically as well as formally—have an allegorical dimension to them. Through its beauty, craft, and “objectness” in space, Scott’s new work creates a kaleidoscope of light, diverse veils, layers, and fields of signification grounded in the heterogeneity of cultural and spiritual locations.

-Victor Zamudio-Taylor

Victor Zamudio-Taylor is a lecturer in the Art History Program, The University of Texas at Austin.

Artist

Joyce J. Scott

Baltimore, Maryland, USA

Joyce Scott was born in 1948 in Baltimore, where she resides today.  She received her MFA from the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende Guanajuato in Mexico. Her extensive exhibition record includes solo exhibitions at The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Art Institute, CA; Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis, MO; Gallery of Contemporary Art, Raleigh, NC; Susan Cummins Gallery, Mill Valley, CA; and numerous other venues.  Among the major group shows in which she has participated are Division of Labor: Women’s Work in Contemporary Art at The Bronx Museum of the Arts; Bad Girls at the New Museum in New York; World Glass Now ‘94 at Hokaido Museum of Modern Art in Sapporo, Japan; American Dreams, American Extremes at The Kruithuis Museum in Hertogen Bosch, The Netherlands; and Surface and Structure:  Beads in Contemporary American Art at Renwick Gallery of the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.  A performance artist as well as an object-maker, Scott creates finely-crafted works made of beads, blown glass, and other materials.  In order to investigate universal concerns with an African-American viewpoint in powerful, unexpected ways, she draws on a provocative mixture of cultural, religious, and decorative symbols.

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Curators

Mary Beebe

San Diego, California, USA

Mary Beebe is the Director of the Stuart Collection, the University of California, San Diego.

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Anthony Jones

New York, New York, USA

Anthony Jones is Rector and Vice-Provost at the Royal College of Art in New York.

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Richard Koshalek

Los Angeles, CA

Richard Koshalek is the Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

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Lowery Sims

New York, New York, USA

Lowery Sims is the Associate Curator of 20th Century Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

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Dianne Vanderlip

Denver, Colorado, USA

Dianne Vanderlip is the Curator of 20th Century Art at the Denver Art Museum.

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Benito Huerta

Houston, Texas, USA

Benito Huerta is an independent critic and artist in Houston, Texas.

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