HEN CARLA HAYDEN ARRIVED for the photograph that graces this month’s cover, (above), I practically ran down the hallway to greet her. If there is such a thing as a famous librarian, it’s the revered Hayden, the 14th librarian of Congress, and the first woman and first Black American to hold the position.

For 23 years prior to her appointment by then-President Obama, she of course served as CEO of the Enoch Pratt Free Library system and, years before, she’d led me on a behind-the-scenes tour of Baltimore’s historic Central Library in Mount Vernon. She and her staff joyfully revealed the secrets of the place—from a lock of Edgar Allan Poe’s hair and one of Tupac Shakur’s early hand-written raps, to its old-world bindery and shipping department, which lends books out across Maryland, including to the state’s jails and prisons. (“It’s not true that prisoners only ask for legal books,” a shipping supervisor had told me. “They ask for the same books as everybody else.”) That same day, Sen. Barbara Mikulski, on this month’s cover as well, happened to be giving a Women’s History Month talk in the auditorium. It was also, coincidentally, St. Patrick’s Day and so several other talented Pratt staff members played Irish music in the main hall—as Hayden cheerfully passed out cookies to an appreciative audience. I thought I had a strong affection for public libraries before but ever since that day at the Pratt with Hayden, I’ve treasured them.

“My library,” philanthropist Enoch Pratt had said when he made his founding bequeathment, “shall be for all, rich and poor, without distinction of race or color,” and no one embodies that spirit better than the down-to-earth Hayden, who still lives in the city and brought her 91-year-old mother to the photo shoot, “because she’s never been to one.” Her leadership, infectious enthusiasm, expansive vision of public libraries, and resolve, when necessary, has been nothing short of transformative at both the Pratt and Library of Congress. Working with her branch managers, she kept all the Pratt libraries open in the days following the 2015 Uprising, showing up the morning after the riots at the Pennsylvania Avenue Branch to help distribute water and necessities. “You can’t ask your staff to do anything that you are not willing to do,” she says.

The idea behind our January cover story, which pays homage to a collection of once-in-a-lifetime trailblazers—Hayden, Mikulski, Brooks Robinson, John Waters, Joyce Scott, and Kurt Schmoke— whose impact has been felt well beyond the city, had been kicking around for some time. The purpose isn’t to bask in nostalgia. Remarkably, most of our cover subjects are still keeping schedules that would exhaust someone half their age. But rather: recognition, understanding, and inspiration. The coming of a new year is, traditionally, a liminal moment of reflection and resolution as we look forward. Who better to learn from than this wildly diverse group?

Together, they are a set of extraordinarily accomplished, yet completely different personalities, by turns provocative, principled, cerebral, compassionate, feisty, funny, resilient, self-deprecating, over-the-top, and—the qualities closest to the hearts of Baltimoreans—loyal and unpretentious.

They each charted a unique, purposeful, and often applecart-upsetting path. John Waters’ outrageous perversion of outdated morality codes with films like Pink Flamingos may spring to mind, but so should then-social worker Barbara Mikulski’s battle against City Hall to save her beloved Fells Point. As should Kurt Schmoke’s courageous stance against the War on Drugs and public-health-centered approach to treating addiction and other city ills.

Meanwhile, the work of the rebellious and irrepressible Joyce Scott, who has described herself as a “true Baltimore babe and Sandtown girl,” can be found in major institutions, from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum. A spiritual force of nature, she is an outspoken social justice warrior and the city’s greatest living visual artist.

Brooks Robinson, as anyone who has ever met him will attest, represents an almost radical civility. Not a civility that’s been lost, but an authentic kindness extended without prejudice to every individual, which has always been in short supply. It’s the reason generations of Baltimoreans named their little boys and girls and, yes, family pets after him. The close friendship between the Robinsons—Little Rock-native Brooks and Oakland-born Frank, the Orioles’ Hall of Fame co-leaders during the tumultuous 1960s—set an example for Baltimore and the country.

Few cities could produce such an eclectic mix of role models, and Baltimore remains a place where you can become a groundbreaking filmmaker, artist, civic leader, mayor, U.S. senator—or the greatest third baseman ever—and remain true to your heart.

The initial surprise to me, and to creative director Amanda White-Iseli and photographer Chris Myers, who shot the wonderful portraits below, is that our group, for the most part, was already very familiar with each other. Waters and Scott embraced and tried to remember the last time they were in the Clipper Mill studio building together—decades ago, maybe the ’70s, they thought. It seemed just the 86-year-old Robinson, whose portrait Norman Rockwell once painted, hadn’t previously met everyone on hand. He knew Mikulski, naturally, who is the same age and a lifelong Orioles fan. That said, everyone knew Brooks Robinson. John Waters politely asked him for an autograph, which may be about the most Baltimore moment ever.

“I thought they all were so nice,” the soft-spoken Hall of Famer with the Arkansas accent said afterward. “Didn’t you think so?”

In fact, as soon as Hayden stepped inside the studio, she waved to Sen. Mikulski, who was seated and getting her portrait taken, and introduced the longest-serving congresswoman ever to her mother. And then she did the same thing when she saw former Mayor Schmoke, the president of the University of Baltimore since 2014.

“Kurt Schmoke brought me here from Chicago. He called Mayor Daley for a reference,” Hayden explained with a smile. “Barbara Mikulski pushed me forward for librarian of Congress.

“You know this is Smalltimore,” she added. “We look out for each other.”

Below, six people whose bylines many will recognize—Rep. John Sarbanes, for example—write about their experiences with, and admiration for, these Baltimore icons.

LONGEST-SERVING WOMAN in the history of Congress. First Democratic woman elected to the Senate in her own right. First woman to chair the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee. Second woman ever to serve in both chambers of Congress. Sen. Barbara Mikulski has made history at every turn. Her achievements have improved the quality of life for millions and earned her many titles. But her most cherished title is the one she’s had since birth: Baltimorean.

My father, Sen. Paul Sarbanes, was honored and grateful to be Sen. Mikulski’s Maryland teammate in Congress for three decades. They knew each other long before that, however. They met as young reformers in Baltimore, “looking out for the little guy,” as my father used to say. They were cut from the same political cloth and fiercely proud of their ethnic heritage, humble roots, and shared stake in the American dream. My father was the son of a Greek restaurant owner and she is the daughter of Polish corner-store grocers. They’d joke, ribbing Sens. Jay Rockefeller and Ted Kennedy, that they were “Diner Democrats” not “Dynasty Democrats.” Both were raised to help the people around them and to make their community a better place.

Sen. Mikulski first gained attention as a citizen activist in the fight to stop the massive urban highway that was scheduled to cut through the heart of the city from West Baltimore to the Inner Harbor, Federal Hill, Fells Point, and Canton. She drew on her Baltimore tenacity and her training as a social worker to become a masterful legislator and make transformative change. She always looked out for her home state and her hometown—fighting for the Port of Baltimore, cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay, supporting space exploration at NASA Goddard, securing funding for the NIH and the FDA, as well as doing countless unseen things that changed the lives of individual Marylanders.

When Sen. Mikulski was first elected, she was often asked how it felt to be the only Democratic woman in the Senate. She’d famously respond, “Though I was the first, I don’t want to be the only,” and spent her career fighting for women and inspiring them to serve. With Texas Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, she launched bipartisan dinners for female senators which continue to this day. Her legislative accomplishments speak for themselves: She helped to establish the Office of Research on Women’s Health at the NIH, passed the Spousal Anti-Impoverishment Act that protected millions of women from going into bankruptcy when their husbands needed long-term nursing care, and championed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which helped ensure women get equal pay for equal work.

I was also privileged to serve with Sen. Mikulski, and she remains a friend and mentor. When she was serving in Congress, we always had a good time at political events where I marveled at her ability to connect with people of all walks of life. She has the magic touch, which includes a certain genius for coming up with a turn of phrase that captures the moment. After experiencing these golden nuggets whenever we were together, I took to recording them as “Mikulskiisms”—things like: “I don’t finger point, I pinpoint.” “Focus on macro issues and macaroni and cheese issues.” Channeling her power as a Senate appropriator, “Where there’s a will, there’s a wallet!”

There are literally hundreds of these insights on life and politics, and usually Sen. Mikulski arrived at them on the spot. But some she repeated because they had special meaning. Whenever she was with a group of volunteers, she showed her deep appreciation for their contributions by acknowledging, “All you do on your own dime and your own time.” And my favorite, her words of wisdom on how to navigate the rough seas of the human condition: “The best, most important ship in life is friendship.”

A scrappy and determined fighter for the people, Barbara Mikulski broke barriers to become a United States senator. But, perhaps more importantly, she always found a way to break through the red tape to help those who had been forgotten and overlooked. She started her career in Baltimore as a social worker and, in her description, she ended her career as a “social worker with power.”

OWING TO HIS PRESCIENT STANCE on drug policy reform, Kurt Schmoke is one of the most influential national politicians of the past 30 years. The first Black elected mayor of Baltimore and a rising political star, he knew such a position could be a death knell to any future goals of running for the U.S. Senate or earning a Cabinet appointment. I remember one ride we took together to Annapolis, in 1994, when he told me that he could easily devise the bumper sticker of a hypothetical campaign against him: “Schmoke: Soft on Drugs, Soft on Crime.” But he felt so strongly that the “War on Drugs” was destructive, he went ahead not only with speeches about drug policy reform, but real policy changes in the city. Some shifts, like treating drug addiction as a public health problem rather than a criminal justice issue, led directly to their widespread implementation, with these policies now accepted by large bipartisan majorities in much of the country.

The needle exchange program he championed was a perfect example of how this thoughtful, gentlemanly politician usually pursued policy change. Rather than attack legislators who opposed the implementation of needle exchange, he launched a two-pronged approach:

1) Gather as much support from a variety of organizations as possible. We asked every group we spoke to for a letter of support for needle exchange and to advocate for this important tool for preventing AIDS in intravenous drug users. 2) Put together a terrific team of Johns Hopkins infectious disease and public health specialists to testify at the legislative hearings. This worked to get the piece of legislation passed by the General Assembly. Getting Governor William Donald Schaefer on board was another story.

Mayor Schmoke was not all gentle persuasion, though. In addition to the soft sell, he could play hardball if the issue at hand was important. Indeed, needle exchange commanded such a response from Schmoke. Few know this, but when then-Governor Schaefer threatened to veto the needle exchange legislation if it passed, Schmoke used me as the messenger to give notice to the governor through back channels that if he continued to oppose the bill, the mayor and I would start providing needles to clients ourselves and force Schaefer to get the state police to arrest us. Unwilling to face the backlash of arresting the very popular Black mayor of the largest city in the state (and his sidekick, the new white health commissioner), the governor not only backed down, but actually introduced the bill in the General Assembly, which the late Elijah Cumming sponsored, and signed it into law. To this day, Baltimore’s needle exchange program is recognized as one of the most effective programs of its kind in the country.

It was very easy to work for Mayor Schmoke. Unlike some politicians who followed whatever way the wind was blowing, the science and data behind an issue was all that mattered to him. Thus, he supported his leadership staff in whatever we wanted to do—as long as there was good evidence that a given action or program would likely be effective. One such controversial effort we launched was Norplant (an implantable form of birth control) in high schools, which was found to be very effective at preventing unwanted pregnancies in teens. Quickly, the program attracted significant populist opposition, and national attention, accompanied by a call for my head for implementing what was characterized as genocide by the opponents. But rather than leave me hanging, which would arguably have been politically prudent, Schmoke doubled down, both defending me and taking responsibility for okaying the program.

The integrity Mayor Schmoke showed in his willingness to risk political ambitions to speak out and act on controversial issues led me, and others, to develop great respect for him. And, while I consider Kurt Schmoke to be one of the five smartest people I know, what led to my deep devotion to him was not his brainpower, but rather the respectful way he treated staff and citizens alike. Indeed, if you ask almost any member of his staff, they will invariably say that the years of working for Schmoke were the best of their working lives.

By Jim Henneman

LIKE HUNDREDS OF AMERICAN LEAGUE hitters and thousands of baseball fans, especially from Baltimore, I vividly recall my first memory of Brooks Robinson. I don’t remember the exact date, but I remember the play. It was a game in September 1956. He was 19 and playing his second year of professional baseball. I was in my third year at Loyola College and moonlighting as an usher in the left-field upper deck at Memorial Stadium.

It was one of those wow plays, very similar to the kind the Cincinnati Reds would witness years later when Brooks led the Orioles to the 1970 World Series title and earned MVP honors. There was a crack of the bat followed by a shooting line drive down the third-base line that went past him and the bag—until it didn’t. What began as a surefire double ended up as an out after a spectacular diving catch and Brooks’ quick throw to first. From my elevated vantage, it was the best play I’d ever seen. Sixteen Gold Gloves eventually followed.

Brooks’ first full season in 1958 was the same year I started writing for the Baltimore News-American. There were many additions to the memory bank, including some personal ones. In 1963, when Brooks’ career was going full speed and mine was still in first gear, my first Opening Day road game turned into a bizarre assignment. For some reason, there was no bat boy for the visiting Orioles, and having had some experience in the O’s minor-league days, I volunteered— something not imaginable today, but those were simpler times, and I was a kid just a few years out of college. Guess who donated a pair of his size-10 spikes to complete my uniform? Fast forward two decades. As a national officer of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America in 1983, I had the honor of participating in Brooks’ Hall of Fame induction ceremony.

When his career was over, Brooks spent years working on the Orioles’ television-announcing crew. He’d be the first to tell you he was more a “color” announcer than an analyst, and it was then, traveling together as we covered the team, that I really got to appreciate the genuineness of his folksy, good-hearted nature—the real reason people in Baltimore named their little boys, and girls, too, after him.

As a player, Brooks was a trailblazer only in the sense that he was the Orioles’ first superstar, the leader of a young pack who lifted the organization to the best record in sports. It was off the field, in the clubhouse and the community, where his soft-spoken modesty and leadership spoke volumes. Never more so than when the Orioles obtained future Hall of Famer Frank Robinson in a blockbuster trade after the 1965 season. Brooks was already a six-time All-Star and one year removed from American League Most Valuable Player honors. The addition of another superstar, a Black slugger who shared his last name, who’d been labeled “a troublemaker” by his previous club’s owner, could’ve potentially disrupted the team’s chemistry.

But while Frank dealt with remnants of legal segregation that still existed in Baltimore, his acceptance in the O’s clubhouse was a non-issue from the jump. Brooks’ stature was such that he did not have to step back to make room for anyone. But make no mistake about this, the way he graciously moved aside, as though making room for a co-pilot, set the tone for a run that produced six pennants and two World Championships in the six years they hit back-to-back in the middle of the O’s lineup. In fact, the pair became known as the “Robinson Brothers,” and even made a Lite Beer commercial together playing off their names and similarities, explaining, however, “we are not identical twins.”

As their careers wound down, Brooks often said Frank, “was the best player I ever played with—and I think one of the best of all time.” He also said: “[Frank] put us over the top.” Left unsaid, and make no mistake about this either, it was Brooks who had led the Orioles to the top. The man’s ability was outweighed only by his humility.

Scott In her baltimore home.

On a sunny fall day, a figure can be seen rising from a grassy patch of land in New Jersey. The sculpture isn’t much to look at yet—not long ago, it had been just a mound, albeit a big one at 15 feet, give or take a few inches. But steadily, the shape of a legendary woman is coming to life. This work depicts Harriet Tubman, the Underground Railroad conductor and Union spy and nurse, and is the vision of Joyce J. Scott, an artist coming into her own legacy.

This sculpture represents a new medium for Scott, who primarily works with beads and found objects in her smaller-scale sculptures. Scott’s intention for the work also departs from her norm. Her Harriet isn’t meant to be displayed permanently: Made with a mixture of soil, clay, straw, and cement, it’s designed to disintegrate. Once the sculpture is complete, Scott intends for it to eventually become part of the earth, 40 miles from the routes where Tubman helped slaves escape to freedom, and 175 miles from Washington, D.C., where debates have raged about putting her countenance on the $20 bill.

Scott sits in a golf cart to one side of this statue, playfully shouting orders at two men who are shaping her Harriet Tubman into being. She watches as the men use implements resembling garden tools to create the folds of the figure’s long skirt. The material begins to crumble around one of their raised trowels and comes tumbling down, prompting Scott to shout at one of the men jokingly, “Kyle’s gone and thrown rocks at everybody.” The men laugh, and look down reverentially, as if they are in the presence of royalty. A few minutes later, Scott begins to get out of her golf cart, and Kyle dashes over to help her. “Look at that, Kyle’s already got my cane,” she says in her trademark teasing style, batting her eyelashes. As Lowery Stokes Sims, retired curator emerita at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, says, “Knowing Joyce is like always being caught up in an impromptu performance.”

Scott, a Baltimore native who, for most of her life, has lived and worked in her home city, joined the ranks of creative royalty in 2016 when the MacArthur Foundation awarded her one of its so-called “genius grants.” The commendation—which honors roughly a dozen “extraordinarily talented and creative individuals” each year with a $625,000 investment in their potential—has brought increased national and international recognition to a woman who is frequently touted as one of Maryland’s greatest living artists. Throughout her career, she has used deceptively simple materials to make profound statements about race, gender, and identity and how they reverberate in the world.

“What comes out when you see [her work] is how vibrant, politically savvy, and aesthetically provocative she is,” Sims says. “You don’t need any explanation of what it means. It just says it. Her energy and her commitment and her conscience just permeate the entire project.”

It’s fitting, then, that Scott spent a good portion of her MacArthur year reflecting on another great Maryland woman for an exhibit at Grounds For Sculpture, a 42-acre sculpture park in Hamilton, New Jersey. Scott’s exhibit, titled Joyce J. Scott: Harriet Tubman and Other Truths, showcases a second outdoor sculpture of Tubman, as well as an indoor installation of her heroine’s imagined bedroom. The show also serves as a retrospective for Scott and features works from throughout her five-decade career in one of the buildings at the park.

“[Harriet Tubman] was someone who was a go-getter and had the nerve,” Scott says. “When we talk about resiliency, self-sufficiency, black pride, Black Lives Matter, black girls matter, we’re talking about her.”

Tubman was born into slavery in the Eastern Shore’s Dorchester County. After escaping to Philadelphia, she returned 13 times to take family and friends to freedom, and was the first woman to lead an armed military raid. But for Scott, the connection to Tubman is more personal. She reminds Scott of the woman who figured most important in her life, who started her on her artistic journey and molded her into the woman she has become: her mother and fellow artist Elizabeth Talford Scott.

“I see the twindom between Harriet and my mom. [My mom] taught me about being a woman, about my responsibility as a woman. And she taught me how, as a woman of blackness, I could make a way where there was no way. I was not supposed to hide my light under a bushel; I was supposed to shine. So in a way, Harriet Tubman has always been there with me. . . . Someone with that kind of grit and gumption, that’s who I want to be—what I want my artwork to be.”

SCOTT AT WORK IN HER HOME STUDIO. SOME OF SCOTT’S PIECES: BUDDHA EARTH; HEADSHOT; ANCESTRY DOLL.

For many in Baltimore’s art scene, Scott’s MacArthur award was a long time coming.

“Joyce has been performing at such a high caliber of artistic genius that it was, at times, frustrating that she hadn’t gotten the MacArthur yet,” says Lesley King-Hammond, Scott’s friend and the founding director of the Center for Race and Culture at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where Scott was once a student. When the news broke in the fall of 2016, “all I could say was, finally, at last, thank God.”

Scott joined a varied MacArthur class, including a computer scientist working to improve the well-being of low-income communities and a composer whose work focuses on the American worker, all theoretically at the cusp of incredible work.

“The MacArthur [Foundation] sees them as the future. And it’s really wonderful that Joyce, at 69 years old, is still considered the future of that conversation, because there’s a value to what she’s doing,” says Amy Raehse, executive director and curator at Baltimore’s Goya Contemporary art gallery and Scott’s longtime gallerist. “[She’s] telling the story of our culture and including those voices that haven’t always been included.”

That’s not to say that this is Scott’s first experience with large-scale exposure. Her work has been praised in countless publications and journals, from The New York Times to the online arts magazine Hyperallergic. “[Her works] exhibit a playful virtuosity, along with attentiveness to wider social issues,” The Times wrote in 2009 after seeing some of her pieces at the Park Avenue Armory. Her work was included at the 2013 Venice Biennale and was the focus of shows at the Museum of Art and Design, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Prospect New Orleans, and The Baltimore Museum of Art, among others.

Creativity was instilled in Scott from a young age, as it had played a large role in her family. Her ancestors were sharecroppers from the Carolinas, and both her mother’s and father’s sides had artistic pursuits, whether that was as potters, weavers, or painters. Her mother made a name for herself internationally as a fiber artist who created quilts with dimension and textural depth. Scott’s father and mother separated when she was 12, and mother and daughter developed a close relationship based not only on living together but on a creative collaboration that lasted until Talford Scott died in 2011.

Like her mother, Scott was most interested in fiber art, but she turned her attention to a humble object that stands in stark contrast to her boisterous, larger-than-life personality: the bead. “Beadwork for me was about extending my family’s techniques of needle and thread, and I put a bead on it,” Scott says. “It’s a very ancient form, and it was my way to be a mad scientist. I [wanted to create] not just for myself but for the betterment of the entire race, so I used beadwork. And I was also out to defy anyone who said it wouldn’t work.”

Early in her career, her works had come alive on a loom, but her creativity transformed in the 1970s. After earning a bachelor of fine arts from MICA and a master of fine arts from the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, she attended an artists’ residency where a fellow artist taught her the peyote stitch, a method of beadwork that allows you to weave freehand. This afforded her the flexibility to experiment with shape and color, and to work improvisationally, like the skat singing she favors as an occasional jazz performer.

Scott rarely sketches, and doesn’t plan her color scheme in advance. Her skill and technique have boggled the minds of the curators who work with her. “She does most of the work herself, which I think is the most extraordinary thing. I’m always saying to her, ‘You know, so and so has 20 people beading for them,’” says Sims. “But for Joyce, the most important thing is for her energy and spirit to be in the pieces. It’s really an extension of her entire being.” Sims is also amazed at how Scott consistently reinvents her art. In the 2000s, she added blown glass to her work. And in 2017, thanks to the Grounds For Sculpture exhibition, she added large-scale sculpture to her portfolio.

Araminta With Rifle And Vèvè and Graffiti Harriet

t’s mid-afternoon on that fall day at Grounds For Sculpture, and Scott is gazing at the long, skinny barrel of a rifle that lays on a table in front of her. This isn’t just any rifle—it’s 10 feet long, made of fiberglass, and its shiny surface glistens in the sunlight. Two visitors pause in their stroll to gaze at its luminance, and Scott notices them. “You can come look at it,” she calls out, motioning them over. She is proud of the direction it has taken. “I don’t have to do this in anybody else’s way but mine,” she has said previously. “It’s a rifle, but it shoots something other than [regular] bullets. And that’s what freedom does. You get shot with something other than pain.”

On the rifle’s surface, preserved in resin, is an amalgamation of objects—glass flowers, buttons, feathers, and beads—blended with more startling items, tiny black figurines whose large, white eyes pop from their faces. Scott has been collecting racist artifacts like these, as well as objects that tell of black identity, for decades. She keeps them in the many rooms that make up her studio in her West Baltimore rowhouse, organized in a manner that only she understands.

The rifle will be held by another piece that Scott is crafting for Grounds For Sculpture. Like the aforementioned sculpture, it will depict Harriet Tubman, but it will be decidedly different from the earthen figure—for one, it will be more realistic and recognizable as Tubman. Like the rifle, it will also be constructed from fiberglass and will stand 10 feet tall. Scott has envisioned this sculpture standing near one of the park’s water sculptures, encircled by quilts, a direct homage to her mother.

The rifle’s significance was further reinforced by its creation. After artists in Grounds For Sculpture’s Seward Johnson Atelier helped Scott fashion the rifle based on her vision, she gathered a group—including members of the sculpture park’s staff, her close friends, and fellow artists—to help her select the objects to put on the rifle and then to help her throw them into the resin.

Scott refines facial details on the 15-foot earthwork Harriet Tubman avatar

“She has this voracious appetite to have a community of people, many times who have never done anything creative, be a part of the artistic process,” King-Hammond says. “She gets a kind of exhilarated high from watching people discover that they have potential to do things that they had never dreamed would come about.”

That inclusivity, that feeling of community, has always been important to Scott and to her art, as it was to her mother and to her ancestors. Scott even considered being a teacher for a time, though she says she quickly understood that “if I were to teach in the city schools, I would be a 700-pound alcoholic.” It also could explain why Scott has remained a steadfast West Baltimore resident, living just blocks from the homes she inhabited as a child. She is honest about the drugs and poverty that she believes have been caused by redlining and other institutionally racist practices, and she frequently tells stories about young people she has chosen to mentor and assist, or about times she has asked dinner hosts if she can box up leftovers and take them to people living on the streets.

That generous spirit was part of what led Gary Garrido Schneider, Grounds For Sculpture’s executive director, to approach Scott about mounting an exhibit there.

“It wasn’t just that she shows you uncomfortable truths or unsettling, powerful messages, but she does so in a way that both pushes you and welcomes you,” Schneider says. At the same time, he knew it would be new territory for Grounds For Sculpture. “We haven’t had a huge history of displaying work that is socially relevant. We haven’t had a long history of dealing with race in the content of the work we were showing. We had to ask ourselves if we were ready for this.”

The October day that Joyce J. Scott: Harriet Tubman and Other Truths opens, Scott greets members of the press in a sunlit, two-story building at Grounds For Sculpture that houses a portion of her exhibition. She wears a regal, floor-length purple velvet tunic and several of her own beaded necklaces. Lately, she has been feeling her age. The knee that had required her to use a cane a few months prior now sometimes requires her to use a wheelchair. But she is cheerful, calling those around her “baby” and “sweet potata.” (It doesn’t hurt that some of her entourage has taken to calling the wheelchair her throne.)

Lowery Stokes Sims and Patterson Sims, the two curators of the exhibition, lead the group through the show. There’s an upstairs section, where Scott’s earlier pieces and a few of her mother’s quilts are on view. Displayed in cases that allow patrons to see the objects from all angles, Scott’s works beckon, enticing visitors to stare at them, but also striking out with their messages like a one-two punch. Take Rodney King’s Head Squashed Like a Watermelon, where luminous black, red, and green beads terrifyingly depict a bloated skull. The museum staff watches closely—the behavior of the press could indicate how the public will react as well.

In addition to the two, large-scale Harriet Tubman sculptures, Scott has created a third, smaller statue devoted to her heroine. This Harriet is made of beads, sitting in lotus pose, displayed high up on a wall. Lowery Stokes Sims tells the group that this work came together in five days. “She would send us pictures every day of the progress,” she says. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” This particular Harriet watches over a room where Scott has interpreted what Harriet Tubman’s dream boudoir would look like—a more intimate view of the woman who often appears strong and solemn. There’s a delicate shawl, a dresser, and an enormous beaded quilt that includes pieces that Scott’s mother knotted shortly before her death.

Graffiti Harriet installed at Grounds For Sculpture in New Jersey

“I Don’t have to do this in anbody else’s Way but MINE.”

After the tour, the press encircles Scott, and she asks bluntly, “So, what do you want to know?”

She answers questions about style and message and tells the group how she’s going to do a whole series of Buddha sculptures. And then the discussion heads into personal territory. Scott tells how her father, Charlie Scott Jr., was scared of her being an artist, probably, she says, “because he thought I would be asking him for money my whole life. He wanted me to be able to provide for myself when they were gone.” But, she says, he had to confront this fear head on when he realized how insistent his daughter was about her chosen path, and how much support she had from the art world.

“Teachers would tell my father, ‘She’s the one,’ meaning I was someone who could actually tackle this life of an artist,” she remarks. There, sitting among a gathering of works that span her five-decade career, she looks around for a moment before she says, with an air of satisfaction, “And I have.”