Joyce Scott

Visual and performance artist Joyce Scott studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she completed her BFA in education in 1970. In 1971 she earned her MFA in crafts from the Instituto Allende in San Miguel Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico. She also studied at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine, in 1976. Scott has since led workshops, presented lectures, and held residencies throughout the United States and Canada.

Her work uses traditional crafting and printmaking techniques to deal with issues of stereotypes, race, gender, violence, and poverty. Scott is especially well known for her work with beads, which she uses to create sculptures or to embellish her works on paper. In addition to the inherent beauty of the beads, in Scott’s work they also reference African cultures. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Kruithuis Museum in the Netherlands, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Art, and the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa. She has received many awards, including a National Printing Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation. Her Island Press work, Sixteen Days in His Life, was featured in her retrospective Kickin’ It With the Old Masters at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2000. Scott’s visit to Island Press was generously supported in part by the Women’s Society of Washington University in St. Louis.