Chrysler Museum of Art Hosting Afrocentric Beadwork Exhibit Until Aug. 17

By Rosaland Tyler
Associate Editor
New Journal and Guide

The Chrysler Museum of Art will exhibit 34 unique designs that artist Joyce J. Scott made from shiny colorful eye-catching beads.

Scott’s exhibit is called, “Messages.” It features striking sculptures, memorable wall hangings and jewelry. Her hand-threaded glass beads display in Norfolk runs from Feb to Aug. 17. Each object is often constructed using thousands of glass seed beads or pony beads, and may include objects or materials such as glass, quilting and leather. Her work has appeared in New York’s Museum and Design, New Jersey’s Grounds for Sculpture, New York’s Peter Blum Gallery, Baltimore’s Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Seattle Art Museum.

Stroll past her creations and expect your mind to take flight and soar to faraway exotic locations since she earned her graduate degree, a master’s of fine arts, at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. She has participated in more than two dozen residencies all over the U.S.A. and completed two back-to-back residencies at the Berengo Glass Studio in Murano, Italy. She spent time in Cape Town at Monkeybiz reviving traditional African beadwork.

“These works are about personal growth, personal epiphanies and how not to get stuck in the easy ways of life,” said Scott, a Baltimore native who earned her undergrad degree at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She was named a 2016 MacArthur Fellow which provides a $625,000 fellowship. In 2016, Scott was awarded a $50,000 Mary Sawyers Baker Award, the largest grant ever given to a working Baltimore artist. She was named a Smithsonian Visionary Artist in 2019.

“The things I am interested in. The things that pressure me and that give me great release are the things I really want to talk about,” Scott said in a MacArthur interview. “They are the reasons why I make the art a lot of times.”

In a sense, she learned how to channel her creativity at her mother’s knee since her mother was a quilter. Elizabeth Talford Scott and her husband Charlie migrated from North Carolina to Baltimore during the Great Migration. Her father worked at Bethlehem Steel and her mother worked as a domestic until she became a full time quilter after 1970. Her mother’s quilts depicted family, tradition, and rituals. Her quilts were exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Walters Art Museum, and the Smithsonian, among others. In 1987 Elizabeth Talford Scott received a lifetime achievement award from the Women’s Caucus for Art.

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Scott was 3 when she began sewing with her mother. She was 5 when she made her first necklaces and jewelry. “I was an artist in vitro,” she is fond of saying.

She learned a different lesson from her father. “My dad never completely approved of me being an artist,” Scott said in a November 2017 interview in The BmoreArt Journal. Scott appeared on the cover. “He always told me to save the money, that no one is going to take care of me. So I always knew that if I wanted to be an artist, I had to make a dollar.”

As an adult, Scott would send her father catalogues from her exhibits, and he’d never say much about them. When she would visit him, however, “he’d introduce me to his neighbors and they’d know all about me,” Scott continued. “They’d tell me he bragged about me. Although he couldn’t say it directly to me, I knew he was proud.”

She said, “One of the reasons I chose beads is because I could afford them. The more I learned about them, the more I realized I had the facility to bend them to my will.”

Scott’s ongoing exhibit at the Chrysler Museum comes on the heels of a 2024 Baltimore-Seattle exhibit that ran four months in the Baltimore Museum of Art and also ran in Seattle from Oct. 17, 2024, through Jan. 20, 2025.