[beads clicking] [singing]
[jazzy music]
- My earliest recollections of learning how to bead
were with my mother.
I was probably five.
[beads clicking] If you had a hole in your shirt,
or if you had towels in the bathroom that had any spots,
they were embroidered, crocheted, or beaded.
Beads are purveyors of light.
Translucency's always my quest.
Also, trying to make beads do things
that people say they don't easily do,
or that people believe
they don't have the skill and prowess to do.
Of course, I believe that.
My influences are generally cultural.
For me, it's important to imbue the work with something
that will resonate and follow somebody home.
Whether it's beauty and they just want to luxuriate in that.
Or it's just the message.
Because I think art has the ability, if not cure or heal,
at least enlighten, slap you in the head, wake you up.
My first library that I went to was built in the '50s.
Remember, Harold? - Mm-hmm.
- And I've been going there since I was in elementary school
and my mother and I exhibited there.
I've lectured there. - Wow.
- I'm a community girl. [Harold laughs]
- Leslie King-Hammond: When I first met Joyce,
I saw her in a festival on John Hopkins' campus.
And I began to talk to her
because I thought her work was so compelling.
A few months later,
my husband and I were sitting out on the front step
and he looks up and says, "Joyce!"
And I said, "You know her?"
And he said, "Yeah, I was in school with her!"
Well, from then on,
we became best friends and we were like glue.
And it's been over, oh my God, 35, 40 years.
- Joyce: Why am I so much in love with Baltimore?
Because of us having a long history
of African-Americans living here.
Part of it is like,
I think we oughta stay where the fight is.
And Baltimore is a highly challenged city.
I know that art can be a tool that changes people's lives.
It's helped to change mine.
I have a very classic African-American background.
My parents picked cotton and tobacco in the South.
They wanted to leave the South and have a better life.
And they treasured education that they didn't have.
It manifested itself in me.
They also talked about the world in which they lived
and their lack of power to change it.
So my work is about the political
and social institutions and trials
that we're experiencing in life.
The fount from where all of this stuff flows
is my mother, Elizabeth Caldwell Talford Scott.
She was someone who picked cotton.
She was a very, very hard worker,
but she always had this creative impulse.
- Michelle Joan Wilkinson: Joyce J. Scott and her mother,
Elizabeth Talford Scott,
are the primadonnas of African-American cultural life
here in Baltimore.
This quilt is by Elizabeth Talford Scott,
and it's called "Joyce's Quilt."
Her mother created the quilt
so that Joyce could learn important lessons in life.
And as you'll see behind me,
there's a fish right in the center.
And that fish is eating the North Star.
So it's really about things that have to do with navigation,
how we move through life.
And the fact that even if we're as bright
as the North Star, something can even come and eat us.
So there's also a rabbit with a shovel tail.
And what Joyce says that's about is that if you dig yourself
into a hole, you can get yourself out of a hole.
- This one really told me about how they were taught to quilt.
And all the ladies would be sitting around.
And what they'd do is the kids would go under the quilt,
like a tent.
And sometimes they'd have to send the needles back up,
but they'd get to hear all those stories
under this magical quilted tent.
Eventually, they were able to come up
and sit next to someone and quilt.
So this is a quilt that's, you know,
using family fabric.
And they're bits and pieces,
like that's a very, very old piece of fabric
that she carried with her when she would go
from place to place, and then eventually when she had me,
had no time to quilt, started to quilt again.
But she took 50 years to complete this quilt.
Now this quilt represents to me what many, many quilts are.
I call them diaries for preliterate people.
'Cause how did people write down family history
many times when you don't have the ability
to read or write very well?
Each one of those stitches is a word,
and they become sentences and paragraphs
talking about the family history.
And when you go back, you read a quilt.
So when I started destroying one of my mother's quilts,
she said to me, "If you love it, you ought to write on it,"
meaning stitching.
[jazz music]
So crafts are epicentral to what I do
'cause I'm listening to my mom telling me those stories.
And they're not just stories
that talk about my family history,
but they're primers on how to start making artwork
that matters.
[jazz music]
We live in a neighborhood with everybody else,
with all of the conundrums of life.
Consequently, if those things affect me
like they do everybody else,
then that's what I'm gonna talk about in my work.
[intense jazz music]
Some things are very theme-oriented,
like race, death, female problems, whatever.
But other things are just either for beauty
or just some kind of geometric thing
I'm going through in my head.
This is called Look Mom, a Doctor .
It's about all those women
who wanted to be married to a doctor.
And sometimes women are so desperate,
they might go to someone from another country,
even someone who might be the stereotype
that they're not the most happy with.
He's shorter, he's much darker skinned.
He's African, but she's convinced herself
that she can fall in love.
Have You Seen This Child?
It's about those ladies
who are trying to find the disappeared ones
in their family.
Right here in the United States.
She and her kid were out somewhere, maybe in the park.
She's got on her denim shorts and her tube top
and she turned her back for a second,
and that child was gone.
She just sits and shows the picture and waits.
This is about Eve accepting the apple from the serpent.
Adam is lost in the sauce, and this is the Tree of Life.
No matter what I do,
I try to be the best bead worker possible.
A lot of this has to do with my being a hoarder collector.
The whole point is like nature and other people
and happenstance and,
everything makes stuff much better than I do.
You know, there are life forces in all of this stuff.
My appreciation of life
and my appreciation of my ability to make art
comes from taking things
that people would consider to be the lowliest of materials
and watching them shine
and watching them tell me what to do.
I have to, see, I must submit to my materials.
They do not submit to me.
Now, if anybody knows my personality,
they think that's a bald-faced lie, but it's the truth.
Things that others would think are worth a penny might be
worth a scrillion dollars to me,
because it opened a path for me to create.
[gentle music]
- I think the issues that are most important to Joyce
and that are evident in her work is,
"Where does prejudice stem from?"
We're at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
And this lobby that we're in right now at the museum
held a major installation that Joyce did
dealing with hate crimes.
Joyce J. Scott: Kickin' It With the Old Masters
literally took over the whole museum.
Before you are seeing
the museum's wonderful Matisses or Degass
or their Warhols in their collection,
you really were confronted.
Joyce had an installation that went from the ceiling
to the floor of all these blown glass heads
that were dealing with hate crimes.
In the opposite corner over here stood
Rodin's The Thinker , above which Joyce created
this amazing lynched figure made of beads.
Rodin, in creating The Thinker ,
its original placement was at the top of his Gates of Hell .
And so Joyce's lynched figure, which hovered over it,
really made us think about how hate leads to racism
and other kinds of criminal activity.
[gentle music]
- I call myself...
an uncertified multiple personality.
I'm very itchy in life.
I'm not comfortable doing the same thing over and over again
without release, without some kind of kick start
that makes me do things differently.
[upbeat jazzy music]
- When I'm somewhere and I'm giving a talk,
people will say at times,
"I believe I've met Joyce Scott, but I'm not certain."
And I say, "No, if you've met her,
you'd know you've met her."
- When you know her, you realize she works so hard.
She is so committed.
Her life, from the minute she wakes up in the morning
till that one hour that she sleeps at night.
'Cause I'm convinced she doesn't sleep.
She's so committed, to her art,
to her community, and to herself as an artist.
- Okay, so he's smooth, he saying.
- Shana: And she gets up and she goes out,
and she meets people, and she teaches,
and she lectures and she sings.
And she does all these things that are real life things.
She just packs them all in a really tight amount of time.
- Get the metal and flatten out where her fingers are, please.
So when I'm asked what I am, I think that
the fact that I'm a bead artist
who integrates bead work in other stuff,
but still is a bead artist makes a difference.
I personally believe, as long as we refuse
to talk about race, we're gonna have a lot of problems.
I do have anger about it,
and one of the great ways that I deal with it
is to make artwork that allows,
in fact, beckons people to come to it.
I want it to be so beautiful
that they can't stop staring at it.
And as they see it,
they have to figure out what that issue means to them.
A crack in the door just a little bit.
Okay, now you should flatten the top of it; it's clear.
It's all about trying to convey the message
in its best form.
So if visual doesn't do it, then music might.
And if music doesn't, maybe theater might.
* Inhale [gentle piano chords]
* Exhale
* And oh
* I believe in life
* Defend
* And agree
* With life
* I
* Starting
* To breathe
[piano trails off]