Joyce J. Scott, “Walk a Mile in My Dreams”
by Matthew Kangas
Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington
Exhibition continues through January 20, 2025
December 7, 2024
Joyce J. Scott, “Dead Albino Boy for Sale” from series “Flayed Tanzanian Albinos,” 2021-22, glass and plastic beads,
thread and wire, 31 x 18 x 13”. All images courtesy of Goya Contemporary Gallery, Baltimore. Photo: Mitro Hood.
It’s worth noting Joyce J. Scott’s ties to Seattle coinciding with this retrospective survey, “Walk a Mile in My Dreams.” The widely heralded sculptor and performance artist from Baltimore had a breakthrough when she was artist-in-residence in 1992 at Pilchuck Glass School. Already working in a glass medium, beads, Scott’s access to master glassblowers considerably increased the size of her figurative sculptures, drawing further art-world attention to her bold vision. In 1995, I included her in the New York exhibition, “Breaking Barriers: Recent American Craft,” at the American Craft Museum (now Museum of Arts and Design), in which I placed Scott alongside major figures such as Dale Chihuly, Viola Frey, and Albert Paley. The thirty years since have confirmed my curatorial judgment.
“Walk a Mile in My Dreams” overflows the ample gallery space with an extraordinary variety of noteworthy objects. Besides beaded necklaces, Scott has made tapestries, prints, blown-glass sculptures, quilts, and clothing along with performance art collaborations and videos dealing with the plights and pleasures of full-figured African American women.
Joyce J. Scott, “Mammkie Wada III,” ca. 1978-81, mixed media, beads, thread, raffia, yarn, hair, ceramics and bone, 7 x 20 x 9”.
There are emotionally powerful subjects on view throughout. They seem candy-coated at first glance in colorful beads, but upon inspection they sting with their depictions of lynchings, rape, slavery, sex trafficking, Black male sexuality, nuclear war, and the role of Black women in raising White children. “Nanny Now, Nigger Later” (1986) is a stark depiction of a Black “mammy” holding a White child. The image typifies the forthright compression Scott continues to use to make her points. Equally concise is “Man Eating Watermelon” (1986), a visual pun in which a boy flees a watermelon about to devour him. Over and over, Scott uses a double-edged sword of humor and horror to draw attention to historical events and stereotypes about African Americans.
Elsewhere, among the strictly figurative works, small assemblages such as “Mammie Wada V” (c. 1978-81) resemble African fetishes with their attachments of bones, hair, straw and shells. These progressed to wall-mounted talismans such as her “Jonestown Series” (1979), in which aspects of that mass murder in Guyana are depicted in memorable images such as “Kool Aid Kocktail” and “The White Boy’s Gone Crazy.” The images impress on us that many of the victims were Black.
Joyce J. Scott, “Coppers,” 2023, glass beads and thread, 46 26 1/2”.
More rhetorically benign, large-scale quilts Scott made with her mother, Elizabeth, blend family events with floral motifs. The quilts evolved into irregular-edged medium- to large-scale wall-hangings which introduced more political subjects, such as threats of nuclear destruction, as in “Happy Holocaust” and “Nuclear Nanny” (both 1983), the latter with its glowing white skeletons. That pull from personal to public issues conveys a powerful emotional urgency that Scott simply cannot resist.
Scott’s use of brightly colored glass beads is crucial to ornate, complicated necklaces such as “Night in the City,” and the statuette covering of the intense “Catch a Nigger by His Toe” (both 1987). These and other small works are displayed in glass cases; they merit close examination to understand Scott’s political consciousness of past and present affairs affecting, and afflicting, Black Americans. You’ll not only witness their decorative magnetism, but see narratives on such subjects as the exploitation of basketball, food insecurity, and racist notions of evolution.
Joyce J. Scott, “Sex Traffic 2,” 2017, hand-blown Murano glass, metal, glass beads, thread and wire, 10 1/2 x 31 1/2 x 8”.
Widely traveled throughout Asia, Latin America and Europe, Scott’s 2011 residency at Berengo Studio on Murano Island in Venice was another turning point. Having the Italians at her beck and call, she once again expanded the size of her sculptures, and realized some of her most ambitious works, including “Buddha (Fire and Water),” “Lewd 2” (both 2013) and “Breathe” (2014).
Cautionary labels are displayed alongside sexually provocative imagery. Besides the aforementioned “Lewd 2,” “Cuddly Black Dick I and III” (1995) and “Sperm Daddy” (1996) satirize notions of White women’s obsession with genitalia. In these and other works, Scott interpolates blown glass into figures and covers them with beads and other materials. Maternity, childbirth, and rape all get their due in works like “Spirit Siamese Twins” (2000), “Sex Traffic” (2017), and the “Day after Rape Series” (2009).
Joyce J. Scott, “Day After Rape Series: The Devil Made Me!,”
2008, commercial glass, peyote stitched glass beads, thread and fabric, 11 3/4 x 4 1/4 x 3 3/4”.
Such facility of construction and diversity of media, along with her intersections of art, theatre, music, craft, and sculpture over the course of more than 30 years, led to her being honored with a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2016.
There is a third reason Scott’s monumental survey deserves our attention. Before or after viewing it, right beside it, you can stroll through one of the greatest museum collections of African art in the world, the Katherine White Collection. Without glancing at any labels, the links to Scott’s synthesizing brilliance will become apparent.
