Joyce J. Scott (American, b. 1948), Night and Crystal

1993, of three dimensional form, the necklace created using brightly colored glass and plastic beads, leather, fabric, thread, and with trapunto work and with the full figure of a woman worked in brown beads to upper left and with a shaped pink element to center, completed with a button and bead hook closure, signed to reverse.

16 x 9 x 1.5 in.

Accompanied by copy of original purchase receipt from Susan Cummings Gallery, Mill Valley, California dated March 14, 1994

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

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

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.

Good condition.