Hall of Fame 6.7.26 - Flipbook - Page 39
Hall of Fame | Sunday, June 7, 2026 39
JOYCE J.
SCOTT
When MacArthur Award-winning glass artist Joyce J. Scott’s hair fell off recently onstage, she didn’t skip a bead ... err ... beat.
But let’s let Scott expound upon her April 9 appearance at the 2026 Maryland Film Festival, where she introduced a documentary about seminal Baltimore artist-curator Leslie King-Hammond:
“I went onstage and I was wonderful,” Scott said. “I looked good.
“By the time they asked me to sing, my Afro puff
was starting to shuckle [Yiddish for moving
around]. I’m in the middle of my song, so I throw
the puff on the floor. I finish my set, then pick up
the puff and put it in my bra so I won’t forget it.”
That anecdote is vintage Scott, from the selfdeprecating humor to her liberal use of Yiddish, a
language whose vivid inventiveness she relishes
and that she picked up as a girl from Jewish neighbors. Scott has never confined her appreciation to
one religion, culture or art form; in the 1980s, she
and actor-director Kay Lawal-Muhammad toured
North America and Europe with their comedy act,
“Thunder Thigh Revue.”
But Scott’s lasting legacy will likely be in the
visual arts. She is celebrated for incorporating
blown, cast and flamework glass beads into everything from $25 earrings to soft sculptures that
tackle intransigent social ills.
“Learning about Joyce has been a lifelong commitment,” said Amy Raehse, a partner at Goya
Contemporary, which has been representing Scott
for nearly three decades.
“Joyce uses radiant surfaces and exquisite colors
to disarm viewers and confront them with racism,
violence, sexuality and power. For Joyce, beauty is
a tool — and she uses it incredibly effectively.”
Another weapon in Scott’s arsenal? Her sense of
humor.
She’s 77 now, and a question about how she views
death results in a riff on rebirth:
“People think they’ll come back as butterflies,”
Scott said, “or as limpid pools beneath a waterfall.
But you could come back as a measle. I wonder what
it would be like to be the first measle? Or, you could
come back as mucus.”
That, in turn, makes her contemplate the pros
and cons of a watery life.
“I would make the worst frog,” she said.
Before Scott croaks, she hopes to benefit the city
where she’s spent her entire life — particularly the
neighborhood that nurtured her.
For 24 years, she shared a house in SandtownWinchester with her mother, artist Elizabeth Tal-
Joyce J. Scott
Age: 77
Hometown: Baltimore
Current residence: Baltimore
Education: Maryland Institute College of Art,
B.S.,1970; Instituto Allende (Mexico), M.F.A, 1971
Career highlights: The renowned visionary and
performing artist was named a MacArthur Fellow
in 2016 and the Smithsonian Visionary Award winner in 2019. Scott has had several solo shows of her
work, including retrospectives at the Baltimore
Museum of Art in 2000 and 2024. Her art is
owned by major museums in the United States and
Europe, including the Baltimore Museum of Art
and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Civic activities: She has mentored dozens
of artists. She also created two public art murals on
view in Druid Hill Park: a mosaic in front of the
Rawlings Conservatory and the grass-filled, tiled
and painted Pool No. 2, now partly in disrepair.
Family: Four siblings
ford Scott, who died in 2011. Since 1974, Joyce Scott
has lived in the Upton neighborhood. Her rowhouse
has become its own work of art, with rooms painted
vibrant shades of turquoise, mustard and tomato,
and filled with multicultural sculptures and wall
hangings. Scott hopes that after she dies, her house
might be converted into an art center.
“Baltimore definitely has its foibles and idiosyncrasies,” she said, “but it’s a city that loves its peeps
[people]. It took me to its breast and suckled me
and made me the person I am today.”
Scott, the daughter of sharecroppers who relocated from the Carolinas to Baltimore in the 1930s
and 1940s, likes to say, “I was an artist in utero.”
Her mother, a quilter, began teaching her beadwork when she was 5.
“If anything in the house was tattered,” she said,
“we would embroider or bead over it to cover up the
hole.”
After graduating from the Maryland Institute
College of Art in 1970, Scott earned a master of fine
arts from Mexico’s Instituto Allende. She traveled
studying traditional cultural techniques — including her trademark off-loom peyote stitch, which
she learned from a Native American artist.
She rose to national prominence in 1991 with her
first major solo show at Washington’s Corcoran Gallery. Other prestigious recognitions followed, including two solo retrospective exhibits at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2000 and 2024. In 2016,
she received a MacArthur Fellowship and three
years later, the Smithsonian Visionary Award.
“Joyce is our elder,” BMA Director Asma Naeem
wrote in an email. “Baltimore royalty. A living legend.”
She describes Scott’s work as “fearless — deeply
personal and unapologetically political,” and added:
“She transforms materials associated with craft into
vessels of truth-telling, insisting that lived experience, especially Black lived experience, belongs at
the very center of contemporary art.”
Scott goes out of her way to mentor young artists.
Several years ago, Raehse witnessed her friend’s
magic touch at a Kansas City college museum. A
young artist of Black and Native American descent
confided to Scott that she was on the verge of giving up because she felt ignored by the white, male
professors who ran the college art department.
“Her hands were shaking and she was holding
back tears,” Raehse recalled. “Then Joyce did something extraordinary. She said, ‘Baby girl, these earrings you made are so good. Can we trade?’”
Scott handed a pair of earrings she’d made to the
student and placed the student’s jewelry in her own
earlobes.
“Years later, a letter arrived from that same young
woman,” Raehse said. “She had been struggling profoundly and even described feeling suicidal. But
that brief exchange with Joyce altered her trajectory. She stayed in school. She found her footing.
She discovered a community that engaged her work
with the seriousness and respect it deserved.
“And she credited Joyce with that turning point.”
— Mary Carole McCauley
