Joyce Scott describes her parents’ story as prosaic. They were sharecroppers in the deep South who went to a one-room schoolhouse. They took the long march to the Upper South not just to escape the overt racism of stepping off curbs for white people, but to have more access to jobs and education. Scott reaped the benefits of that.
One of the first pieces viewers encounter in the Baltimore Museum of Art’s retrospective of her 50 years of art, “Walk a Mile in My Dreams,” is a tribute to those opportunities given to her by her parents, who settled here in Baltimore. “The Threads That Unite My Seat to Knowledge” is an homage to the generations of makers in her family.
Her mother, artist Elizabeth Talford Scott (who also has an exhibit at the BMA until April 28, 2024), encouraged her creativity and her father instilled independence. Both nurtured her education. Her grandparents had been enslaved, and were skilled at quilting, crochet, metalwork, and more. “Seat to Knowledge” honors them all with quilts, books, dolls, beadwork, sculpture, and other media, capturing the environment and history Scott carries with her.
Scott does weaving, playwriting, sewing, flamework, beadwork, sculpture, poetry, performing, painting, and much more. What art form is left that she might want to tackle?
“You know, I’ve tried a lot of things. And the answer to that is that I’d like to just have the time to do a couple, a whole series of what I already do,” Scott said. Referring to the many beaded wall-hangings, of which she’s immensely proud, she continued, “They’re not all the wall hangings that I’ve done, and I was really thinking I’d love to put together a giant exhibition – a suite – of a variety of these wall hangings out of beadwork.… Beadwork that will take a lot of time.”
“But there’s nothing like it, and I am one of the few people very good at it who excels at this technique. Did I say that out loud?” Scott laughed.
While she appreciates what she calls the blessing of having so many events to do, she would like to slow down a little and focus on working at her own pace and excelling at her art. Scott called it “mulling” or “stupid” time, where she gets to luxuriate in the process and beauty of the materials before she transfers it to the work.
The installations at Baltimore Museum of Art are very labor intensive, and she worked with assistant colleagues to put it together – something she seldom does. “It was wonderful because I get a lot more done and also be a mentor to them,” Scott said.
There’s a stunning directness to Scott’s work, and a subtlety requiring the viewer to lean in closely to discover. Some of her large woven figures and dolls made from wood or other materials seem complete in and of themselves until one looks more closely at the face to see that the eyes, nose, and mouth have cut-out photographs of human eyes, noses, and mouths attached to them.
In the room-sized piece entitled “Lynched Tree,” a woman’s shape made from plastic, beads, thread, wire, and other materials depicts the grotesque scene of a woman’s broken body hanged by her foot from a tree. Yet with all that is happening in the sculpture, one must look closely to notice the reddening between her legs.
“I think that folks don’t necessarily expect [subtlety] from me when they meet me,” laughed Scott. “When someone first meets me, subtlety in personality, he might go, ‘I’m not sure that those words [fit].’ Well, but I am subtle in many ways, and the work is subtle … for many reasons.”
Scott credits her training. “Firstly, I’m a well-trained artist. That’s one of the things you get trained to do. So, I’m employing what I was taught.”
She then spoke about theater having taught her to extend modes in a variety of ways. “I’m transferring all of the things that I know into the visual world and visual work responds to me because the materials do different things,” Scott said. “So, fiber can be very subtle, it has a different feeling to it density, that’s very different than beads and the amount of time that it takes.”
Scott doesn’t feel the need to bludgeon viewers over the head with things they already see on the news. She uses everything in her artistic toolbox to help the viewer realize that the figure they are viewing is a woman who has been raped, so she doesn’t need to do a lot of “yelling.”
Of the Lynched Tree piece, she said, “To me it’s almost like sheet music in the way that the colors and the forms fall against each other in some very loud, some really, really long, long, long notes, you know? So as a singer-performer, I think about how lyrical some of the work is and how rhythmic some of the work is. But I don’t necessarily have to overtly do that anymore because I’ve been doing artwork for so long, but I can look back at it and go ‘yep, that sheet music. I got it now.’ I understand what was happening. That’s cacophonous; that’s slow and easy. That’s jazz; that’s rap.”
There’s an installation called “Bearing Witness,” with a small selection of Scott’s beaded sculptures addressing racial stereotypes and which contain sexually explicit imagery. People are urged not to take photos in this room, and to be reflective of their own need to take care of themselves and rest as needed.
Within this gallery are works that remember the grievous history of lynching and mourn the persistence of anti-Black violence today. To create a safe and respectful environment for visitors of all backgrounds to engage with this work, please enter with mindful self-awareness and deep care. Allow other visitors and staff the space required for their own emotional responses. Consider limiting your use of photography and being present in your own experience. Journals are available in the Rest and Reflection spaces nearby for your continued reflection. Text on a plaque upon entry to “Bearing Witness” installation.
The walls are painted a matte black, and the only glisten and shine are some of the beads, in some pieces evoking tears, others wet ground, others blood. The first sculpture, “Catch a N*gger By His Toe,” depicts a lynching of a man hanging upside down from a tree branch by one ankle held by a red thread. His other leg hangs by his side in a near split, his arms hang by his ears, fingers splayed and face in contorted inverted horror.
Most of the beads that form the piece “Rodney King’s Head Was Squashed Like a Watermelon” are black, apart from the green and red used to form his lips and tongue, evoking the watermelon simile and racist reference.
“Strange Fruit” has a woman in a green dress with her hand on her face, staring up at a tree containing several translucent, light green leaves. From the branch hangs what seems to be the body of a child or teen, judging from their size, made of shining black beads.
“There’s something so amazingly and deeply heinous about what lynching was in this country. Now everybody has some way of torturing and killing and pulling bodies apart,” Scott said. “We have different kinds of lynching now. At that period of time, people would literally burn cars, eviscerate folks in public, thousands of people have their children there. They’d make postcards of it and send it through the public post.”
She notes that it was almost always on the east coast, and almost always happening to Black people. Scott considers it happenstance that she was not part of that in real time, but it is her history, and she wants younger generations to know the truth about why some Black people have anger and trauma surrounding that history.
Scott insists that racism harms the oppressed and the oppressor. “There’s that old statement that no one is free until all is free, but you can’t move if your foot is on my neck. So, nobody moves. So, nobody evolves and becomes this wonderful human being that you can be,” Scott said.
The retrospective “Joyce J. Scott: Walk a Mile in My Dreams” is at the Baltimore Museum of Art until July 14, 2024. To purchase tickets, click this link.
