The provocative beadwork of Joyce Scott

Picture via Lee Ness

Joyce Scott has uncanny expressive figures are a far sight beyond ornament when she makes her work out beads. Her sculptural faces and bodies are eloquent signifier and both political statement and beauty.
Her subject matter continues to stir up controversy, because Joyce never skirts the painful matters inherent in racial and sexual stereotypes, Rather, she confronts them directly with powerful image rendered with exquisite technique and proffered with unflinchingly candid titles.

Her own African American heritage deeply influences both her point of view and her choice of media. As child Joyce Scott learned quilting, and beading from mother Elizabeth Scott. Joyce got her BFA from Maryland Institute and she pursued a graduate degree in Mexico at Institute de Allende where she lost herself in native crafts. After Mexico she continued her work study of indigenous crafts, including Native American beadwork, Navaho’s rug weaving and the quilt techniques of the Kuna people of Panama.

From all these travels were not merely a gathering of technical skills but a diversity of perspectives. This multiplicity continues to inform her work where Buddhist, Haitian vodoun, and Victorian aesthetic references can come into play.

Picture via Lee Ness

Her works candor has often included using genitalia or racial epithets to challenge her viewer’s preconceptions and to address the social issues that concern her. As a result her artwork has not always met acceptance.

In 2005 the First Center in Nashville, Tennessee canceled a show of her work because the staff worried that if would offend their audience. Joyce has remarked in many interviews that feels when people react so negatively that she does not anticipate that. It feels to her a very quite when she is creating something. The way she works is meditative a quite process that her work emerges from. She responds to what is going on out there.

The thing that is exciting her right now is combining glass and beadwork. With various artist-in-residence and teaching stints she has expanded her involvement with glass spending time with Paul Stankard and at the Pilchuck school of Glass among others.

Her desire to merge these two media one might say submerge one medium within its former self is still being refined. As with any daring venture, danger exist. Hours of intricate stitching can be undone in molten moment. But she works through these let downs and usually the piece comes out better than before as seen in these pictures.

The work is her exhortation that the world respond to the social, political and economic injustices in Africa. She thinks how we as a species respond to what is happening in Africa bodes a lot for humanity. She write this down as note to remind herself of that or do a piece like that. Undoubtedly she knows that her power to enact change lies most potently in the imagery she creates.

 Picture via Lee Ness