Joyce J. Scott: Repositioning Craft as a Forceful Stage for Social Commentary and Activism

For more than three decades, trailblazing artist and activist Joyce J. Scott has elevated the creative potential of beadwork as a relevant contemporary art form. Scott uses off-loom, hand-threaded glass beads to create striking figurative sculptures, wall hangings, and jewelry informed by her African American ancestry, the craft traditions of her family (including her mother, renowned quilter Elizabeth T. Scott), and traditional Native American techniques, such as the peyote stitch. Each object that Scott creates is a unique, vibrant, and challenging work of art developed with imagination, wit, and sly humor.

Born to sharecroppers in North Carolina who were descendants of enslaved people, Scott’s family migrated to Baltimore, Maryland, where the artist was born and raised. Scott hales from a long line of makers with extraordinary craftsmanship adept at pottery, knitting, metalwork, basketry, storytelling, and quilting. It was from her family that the young artist cultivated the astonishing skills and expertise for which she is now renowned, and where she learned to upcycle all materials, repositioning craft as a forceful stage for social commentary and activism.

In the 1990s, Scott began working with glass artisans to create blown, pressed, and cast glass that she incorporated into her beaded sculptures. This not only allowed her to increase the scale of her work, but also satisfied her desire to collaborate. In 1992, she was invited to the Pilchuck Glass School, Stanwood, Washington. Continuing her interest in glass, Scott has worked with local Baltimore glassblowers as well as with flameworking pioneer Paul Stankard and other celebrated glass fabricators. In 2012, Goya Contemporary Gallery arranged to have Scott work at Adriano Berengo’s celebrated glass studio on the island of Murano in Italy, creating works that were part of the exhibition Glasstress through the Venice Biennale.

Scott has worn many hats during her illustrious career: quilter, performance artist, printmaker, sculptor, singer, teacher, textile artist, recording artist, painter, writer, installation artist, and bead artist. Her wide-ranging body of work has crossed styles and mediums, from the most intricate beaded form to large-scale outdoor installation. Whether social or political, the artist’s subject matter reflects her narrative of what it means to be Black in America. 

Scott continues to live and work in Baltimore, Maryland. She received a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Selected solo museum exhibitions include The Baltimore Museum of Art (2024); Seattle Art Museum (2024 – 2025); and Grounds for Sculpture (2018), Trenton, NJ. She is the recipient of myriad commissions, grants, awards, residencies, and prestigious honors including from the National Endowment for the Arts, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Anonymous Was a Woman, American Craft Council, National Living Treasure Award, Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for the Arts, Mary Sawyers Imboden Baker Award, MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2016), Smithsonian Visionary Artist Award, National Academy of Design Induction, and Moore College Visionary Woman Award, among others.

In March of 2024, Scott opened a major 50-year traveling Museum retrospective titled Joyce J. Scott: Walk a Mile in My Dreams co-organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and Seattle Art Museum. Also in 2024, Scott opened Bearing Witness: A History of Prints by Joyce J Scott at Goya Contemporary Gallery. Her latest exhibition, Joyce J. Scott: Messages, opened at The Chrysler Museum of Art on February 6, 2025 and will run through August 17, 2025 at the Glass Projects Space. This exhibition is organized by Mobilia Gallery, Cambridge, MA.

Says Carolyn Swan Needell, the Chrysler Museum’s Barry Curator of Glass: “We are thrilled to host this focused traveling exhibition here in Norfolk at the very moment when Scott’s brilliant career is being recognized more widely, through a retrospective of her work that is co-organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Seattle Museum of Art.” 

In Messages, 34 remarkable beaded works of art spanning the artist’s career express contemporary issues and concepts. Included in the show is Scott’s recent beaded neckpiece, War, What is it Good For, Absolutely Nothin’, Say it Again (2022). A technical feat in peyote stitch, infused with color and texture, this multilayered and intricate beadwork comments on violence in America.

Embedding cultural critique within the pleasurable experience of viewing a pristinely crafted object, Scott’s work mines history to better understand the present moment. The visual richness of Scott’s objects starkly contrasts with the weight of the subject matter that they explore. She says: “I am very interested in raising issues…I skirt the borders between comedy, pathos, delight, and horror. I believe in messing with stereotypes, prodding the viewer to reassess, inciting people to look and then carry something home – even if it’s subliminal – that might make a change in them.”