Joyce J. Scott (American, b. 1948), Flaming Skeleton Series #1

1993, neckpiece worked with vibrant color glass and plastic beads, metal, fabric, and thread featuring a full standing skeleton to one side designed in white and black beads against an orange bead ground, and center with tubular shaped beads arranged in a lattice design, completed with velcro tabs for closure, with faded signature and date to tabs.

14 x 10.5 (widest) in.

The Contemporary Art Collection of Francine & Benson Pilloff, Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Esther Saks Gallery, Chicago, Illinois

Exhibited:
GLASS TODAY, Cleveland Museum of Art, 1997, p. 73
Fusion: Contemporary Art Glass from North Carolina Collections, North Carolina Museum of Art, 2005

Accompanied by a hardbound edition of Joyce J. Scott, Walk a Mile in My Dreams, Catharina Manchanda and Cecilia Wichmann, 2024

Born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1948 to a family of artists, Joyce Scott is celebrated as a sculptor, weaver, printmaker and is best known for her intricate bead work. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art and her Masters of Fine Art from the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico and is a MacArthur Fellow. Her art, influenced by her family's craft traditions and her African American heritage, confronts the context of contemporary societal issues and stereotypes. Scott has said that she believes "in messing with stereotypes. It's important for me to use art in a manner that incites people to look and then carry something home, even if it's subliminal." Her work primarily uses the peyote stitch, an off-loom, free-form, glass bead weaving technique that merges beads, blown glass, and repurposed objects with "autobiographical, sociological, and political content to confront difficult subjects, while also embracing the beauty of her materials."

Her work has been exhibited in numerous museum collections, including The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Mint Museum, and others. The Baltimore Museum of Art holds the largest collection of her work and in 2024, along with the Seattle Art Museum, organized a fifty-year retrospective of the artist, Joyce J. Scott: Walk a Mile in My Dreams.

Amy Raehse writes in her work, A History of Prints: Joyce J. Scott, that “In Scott's oeuvre, the recurring motif of skeletons serves as a dual symbol of mortality and renewal. Rather than embodying purely negative implications, this motif is imbued with a nuanced complexity that reflects the multifaceted nature of the human experience.”



Good condition.