Sandtown-born Joyce Scott learned quilting from her mother, Elizabeth Talford Scott, who learned it from her mother, on the South Carolina plantation where she grew up among a family of sharecroppers. Both went on to acclaimed careers as mixed-media fiber artists, though Joyce, named a 2016 MacArthur Fellow and 2019 Smithsonian Visionary Artist, became more renown for her figurative statues, her jewelry, bead, and glasswork—and, in Baltimore, the massive Memorial Pool installation at Druid Hill Park, which honors the park’s historic segregated swimming pool.

In 2018, the ever-evolving Scott created a towering 15-foot sculpture of Harriet Tubman with a mixture of soil, clay, and straw that was designed to disintegrate into the land near where Tubman led enslaved people to freedom.

With all this and more in mind, the Baltimore Museum of Art presents a 50-year career retrospective of one of the country’s most important working artists today. “Joyce J. Scott: Walk a Mile in My Dreams” opens as a special ticketed exhibition March 24 and runs through July 14 before moving to the Seattle Art Museum.

I recently saw the BMA’s exhibition of your late mother’s work, which will run concurrently with yours through April. The combination builds on your joint 2019 BMA show: “Hitching Dreams to Untamed Stars.”
My mother was born in 1916 and saw amazing change in the world. I lived with her until she passed away [in 2011]. I went to graduate school and traveled and those things, but we were very close. We had that through line of the visual and performing arts, which gave us something to relate to, to talk about, and to build on. For some people, it’s cooking, but for us, art was our conspiracy and our invitation to others. Because once we make it, we share it.

The BMA tells us you’re creating a site-specific installation at the entrance of the retrospective. A small house?
I don’t know what drove this, except I was thinking of a sweat lodge or a gathering space where people would commune in the everyday sense, but also maybe spiritually. It’s a huge four-sided building—picture a yurt—that has quilts on the outside. One in each panel of my mother, grandfather, grandmother, and godmother. The inside is turned out with beaded pieces I did…There’s also a figure who is holding a needle and reaching out with the thread, which represents where I came from and the way that I give as an artist and teacher. And there’s a chair covered in books and tchotchkes from my life that have influenced me.

And you and others may appear inside the “yurt,” greeting people and performing?
Yes, it’s a place where I can sit or, if a storyteller or musician comes in, they can sit and commune with visitors. Sometimes I’m going to come and just sit and talk trash until they throw me out. The guards are already giving me the stink eye.

That’s funny. Can I ask about the nature and themes of your work? How craft or folk art blends with so-called high art or fine art? There are quilts, figurative statues—which are intricately done—jewelry, clothes, dolls. But the titles, “Strange Fruit,” “None Are Free Until All Are Free,” “Lynching Necklace,” make you look twice and reflect on what at first glance may not be obvious.
I’m an artist-craftsperson. I don’t separate them. I’m always doing both. It’s the same impulse, the same creative feeling or setting that makes me make a cup and makes me make a piece of sculpture. There’s not a hierarchy that I ascribe to. I’ve always liked figures and my mom was a doll-maker, too. The work must be created wonderfully, not always beautifully, just wonderfully, so that the person is mesmerized by it. Then they realize, that’s a lynching, or that person is shooting a gun.

You’ve traveled to Africa, Europe, Asia, South America, mixing these diverse influences into different mediums. At the same time, it all remains, intrinsically, your art.
That’s it. I don’t want to be a one-trick pony. I don’t want to be a pony at all…My best voice for communication is as an artist and those influences [and mediums] represent different approaches to art and life that hopefully make me a better person, a more well-rounded, approachable, knowledgeable person. I can’t say it’s enough that I’m alive, that I should eat good food, look good. I think I’m supposed to be on this quest. I feel I am supposed to make this world better for others in whatever way I can.

In the exhibition Hitching Their Dreams to Untamed Stars: Joyce J. Scott and Elizabeth Talford Scott, it’s difficult to determine who influenced who—and even to differentiate, in some instances, which of the nine pieces was done by which artist.

It’s evident, however—in the asymmetrical, mixed-media textile pieces, the rich colors that vibrate with life, and the stories and meaning woven into each piece—that this mother and daughter, who lived and worked together in Baltimore for 60 years, influenced one another deeply.

“People ask, ‘What’d your mom say to you?’ She said to never give up . . . Just follow that dream and never stop. Persevere. Everything is out there for you,” Scott recalls at the Baltimore Museum of Art during a preview of the exhibit, which opens publicly on May 15 and runs through December 1. “That has been the code for my life.”

She’s cloaked in colorful batik and tie-dyed fabric and sitting in a wheelchair, looking regal (she assures everyone in attendance that she’ll be out of said wheelchair and dancing again as soon as her knee is in better shape). “I come from people who couldn’t be who I am right now who opened that door for me to come through, and I’m very proud to be someone who’s carrying this with me.”

Scott learned quilting from her mother (and her mother learned it from her mother), and both primarily create mixed-media fiber art, though Scott, named a MacArthur Fellow in 2016, became more well-known for her sculptural beadwork and jewelry.

Aside from indirect influence, the mother-daughter duo has directly collaborated to create pieces, too. Talford Scott began “Fifty Year Quilt” (not shown in this exhibit) in San Francisco when she was young, for instance, and wherever she traveled, she’d add fabric. When Scott was born, she got to work on that same quilt, adding more stories of places traveled. They also made beadwork and dolls together, sang together, and talked at lectures together before Talford Scott passed away in 2011.

The piece “Face,” made in the 1970s and included in Hitching Their Dreams, was also created by both of them: Scott wove its colorful wool in response to her mother’s storytelling.

Scott has never been known to shy away from controversial imagery and subject matter either. Some of her work is overtly subversive, either artistically or politically or both (think “Inkisi #2,” her mixed-media sculpture of a woman whose large skirt is affixed with, among other items, bright green penises—representing procreation, she explains).

Talford Scott’s “Plantation” is an example of quilts that were made and used as escape routes for African Americans wanting to flee a plantation in the South. Creating something beautiful that represented something else entirely was a lesson taught to Talford Scott by her grandparents—how to hide in plain sight. For instance, a 20-inch row of the fabric in this topographical map might represent a line of cotton or vegetables. The stars that fill its white background represent the stars they would view in the night sky overhead that could be used for navigational purposes, making the piece both whimsical yet practical, artful yet political, comforting yet tense.

Scott says she has a “classic Negro history.” “My mom picked cotton and my father picked tobacco. They were in the Great Migration from the South . . . not only to get jobs that were better, but so that they wouldn’t be harassed by nightriders every night in their communities. And then they had me.”

Her mother and father attended one-room schoolhouses—roughly equivalent to a sixth-grade education today—but that didn’t stop Talford Scott from bringing her young daughter to the BMA, after her family relocated to Baltimore. It didn’t stop her from believing in Scott’s artwork and cheering her on, telling her she could follow her dreams, a reference Scott makes in the show’s title.

Scott lives in Upton, which she admits can be a rough neighborhood, but it’s home. “I don’t believe the change happens by running away from yourself,” she says, “I believe that when you stay in a community, you make a difference.”

People in Scott’s neighborhood call her “Mom,” just as they called Talford Scott, who would make her own wine and sit around and talk and teach people in the neighborhood to make art.

Scott recalls a talk she gave with her mother at the University of Colorado Boulder, where they were invited to speak to a ceramics class. Her mother talked about how she and her family would make pinch pots during the Depression, because you had to make your own pots for everything. And those things that you made could be beautiful. The class listened in awe, mouths agape. Even Scott was impressed, having heard similar stories as a young child but hearing them again provided new context.

Growing up in Sandtown in the ’50s, Scott was surrounded by stories like this—relatives working as sharecroppers or running and hiding from people who were after them or paying people off with bootlegged drink.

“There’s something about living in the 21st century that is very, very different in the United States, more than other parts of the world,” she says. “When my mom and other people of her generation go, that’s it. You can look them up online, you can even hear them talking online, but that thing about sitting next to them, having a shot of Hennessy or something, and hearing her talk.

“That old generation is taking with them their knowledge and secrets of the past that we in the West don’t always even celebrate,” Scott goes on. “But you go to Asia, you go to Africa, you go to Central America, and you meet that exact woman who is just like my mom, who’s still tilling the soil or spinning something with her grandkids, talking about stuff in the exact same way. I think it’s a loss for us, for our speed to be so future-[oriented]. It’s not giving the props to the past that built all of us.”

Visual Art

Hitching Their Dreams to Untamed Stars: Joyce J. Scott & Elizabeth Talford Scott
Joyce J. Scott is a national treasure, but Baltimore gets the joy of claiming her as one of our own. With this new exhibition featuring both the work of Scott and her mother, Elizabeth Talford Scott, visitors to the Baltimore Museum of Art have the chance to experience the decades-long artistic conversation between mother and daughter through quilts, sculpture, and intricate needlework. May 15-Dec. 1. Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Dr.

Mental Health Awareness Month Art Show
Mark the 70th Annual Mental Health Awareness Month by supporting both local artists and the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation at this multi-week art show. Stop by opening night for live painting, poetry readings, glassblowing demonstrations, and live music, then peruse works by the likes of Annie Howe Papercuts, Suburban Avenger Studios, Gilah Press + Design, and more. Opening May 17 at 7 p.m. UNION Craft Brewing, 1700 W. 41st St.

Music

Letitia VanSant + Goodnight Moonshine feat. Molly Venter
Songstress Letitia VanSant’s personal and political lyrics have earned her both local and international acclaim. Don’t miss your chance to hear her powerful, Americana-inspired arrangements alongside lush, folksy tunes from Goodnight Moonshine. May 10 at 8 p.m. Creative Alliance, 3134 Eastern Ave.

Theater

Welcome to Shakesville
Boogie on down to Zion Church for this latest spectacle from Baltimore Rock Opera Society. During the birth of the psychedelia, one girl, Betty, is on a quest to solve the mysterious disappearance of Jimmy Graves in the colorful and crazy world of Shakesville. Travel back to 1965 with this BROS crew during this nod to all things groovy. May 24-June 16. Zion Church of the City of Baltimore, 400 E. Lexington St.

A New Brain
In 1992, award-winning author William Finn suffered a brain seizure shortly after the opening of Falsettos (which he co-wrote with James Lapine) and was hospitalized. The experience inspired this latest Iron Crow Theatre production, the poignant and surprisingly funny story of children’s TV composer Gordon, who dreams of writing a Broadway hit but is blindsided by a life-threatening brain tumor. May 31-June 9. Baltimore Theatre Project, 45 W. Preston St.

Film

Maryland Film Festival
Christmas for cinephiles has come again. The Maryland Film Festival returns for four days and five nights of films, special guests, and great experiences for movie lovers of all stripes. Catch some new documentary screenings, join John Waters to watch a Nicolas Cage rampage, or just pick a time slot and see what’s new with some friends. May 8-12, Various Station North locations

Literature

Meet Matthew A. Cherry and Vashti Harrison
Gather the kids and head to The Children’s Bookstore for this visit and book signing with the author and illustrator of Hair Love. Born from a lack of representation in animated projects and the desire to promote hair love in kids, this sweet father-daughter tale of love and self-acceptance is sure to become a favorite among both children and parents.