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Judith Scott - artist extraordinary 1943-2005 |
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New York Times:
`June 25, 2001 Artist
Emerges With Works in a 'Private Language' By EVELYN NIEVES OAKLAND,
Calif., June 22 - As the white minibus pulled up to the Creative Growth Art
Center at 9:33 a.m., Judith Scott barreled off as if her life depended on it. The
bright glass-and-brick studio for developmentally disabled adults had opened
three minutes before she arrived. It might as well have been three hours.
Holding her usual stack of magazines like a baby in one arm and her blue
insulated lunch bag in the other, Ms. Scott whooshed past the line of clients
waiting to sign in like a dart to a bull's-eye. In a blue flash - she was
wearing a navy blue sweatsuit and a blue-and-white nylon scarf over her wispy
gray hair - she was planted in her usual corner in the back. She
was already hard at work on one of the cocoonlike fiber sculptures that are
making people in the art world take notice, weaving and threading like nobody's
business, before most of the other clients had made it through the door. Ms.
Scott, who has Down syndrome, does not speak, hear, read or write. No one knows
for sure if she knows what she is creating. But some art experts seem as
fascinated with her pieces as she is with making them. Two
solo exhibitions of her woven objects have just opened: one at the Palais Joyce,
a gallery in Paris, and the other at the Shisedo Foundation in Tokyo. In
October, the Shisedo exhibition, which traces the evolution of Ms. Scott's work
at Creative Growth over 13 years, will travel to the Collection d'Art Brut in
Lausanne, Switzerland. Her pieces, including works exhibited in galleries in
SoHo and Chelsea in New York City this spring, have sold for up to $15,000. "The
uniqueness of her expression qualifies her to be taken seriously as an
artist," said Rebecca Hoffberger, founding director of the American
Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. The museum, which specializes in self-taught,
or outsider, artists, has 13 of Ms. Scott's pieces in its current fifth
anniversary exhibition, "Visions of the Soul," and features Ms. Scott
in the current issue of its magazine, Visions. Tom
DiMaria, the Creative Growth Art Center's director, said Ms. Scott's creations
drew patrons who know nothing of her disabilities. "Of
course, when people know Judy's story," Mr. DiMaria said, "people
really find the art very compelling and fascinating." No
one knows what she is creating, or why she is so driven to create it. Maybe Ms.
Scott, who turned 58 last month - old for a person with Down syndrome - wants to
make up for lost time. She spent 36 years locked away in mental institutions in
Ohio, left to stare at four walls. This started when she was 7 and her condition
was misdiagnosed as severe retardation when she was, instead, severely hearing
impaired. It ended, finally, at age 43, when her fraternal twin sister, Joyce,
brought her to live near her in Berkeley, Calif. "In
'86, I just realized there's no reason why I shouldn't take Judy out and bring
her home," Joyce Scott said the other day from Bali, Indonesia, where she
was spending several weeks with her husband working on a children's aid
foundation. "What's so stunning to me is that I didn't realize it
sooner." Judy
Scott was sent away after she tested "as low as can be" on I.Q. tests,
her sister said. It was not until she was in her late 30's that it was
discovered that she was actually almost deaf. For the family, this was almost
unbearable. Their widowed mother, who still lives in Ohio, found it increasingly
difficult to visit Judy. The twins' three older brothers (one has since died)
also stayed away. "What
I find so amazing and remarkable about Judy is that she survived
everything," Joyce Scott said. "And she not only survived, she has
come to show that someone who has been written off by society, one of the
throwaways, can come back and show us that they are capable of being
remarkable." During
her first year at the center, Judy Scott showed no inclination or aptitude for
art. The staff at the nonprofit center, where 120 mentally, emotionally,
developmentally or physically disabled clients spend days engrossed in all modes
of art, worried that Ms. Scott was not a good fit. She scribbled distractedly on
paper for several months, then stopped and would do nothing. Then
one day, more than a year later, in a fiber art class, she picked up some sticks
and began wrapping yarn around them. It became her first piece. Her
work and its process and progress are so powerful and disturbing that John M.
MacGregor, an art historian and an expert on outsider art, found himself
studying her while he was researching a book on another Creative Growth Art
Center artist, the late Dwight Mackintosh. Mr.
MacGregor's treatise on Judith Scott and her art, "Metamorphosis: The Fiber
Art of Judith Scott" (Creative Growth Art Center, 1999), the basis for
several international exhibitions, explores both the artist's methods and the
larger question of whether an artist of stature can emerge in the context of
"massively impaired intellectual development." Ultimately, Mr.
MacGregor suggests that Ms. Scott's sculptures, sometimes as big as she is, are
"masterpieces in an unfamiliar and deeply private language." Ms.
Scott gives away no clues. She sits in her corner, a stout 4-foot-9 woman whose
legs dangle in the air from her chair, glued to her piece with confident
concentration. At times, her watery blue eyes look around to survey the studio.
Sometimes, she steals away objects - little things that may include wallets - to
mummify and incorporate in her work. Gross
sales from her art have come to $150,000 this year, but with the 50 percent
gallery commission and the art center's 50 percent cut of the remainder, she has
made about $35,000, which is put in a trust. Her only extravagances are her
scarves - each day, she wears a different one, wrapped on her head in a
different way. She
lives comfortably in a supervised home with 14 other disabled adults. The
sprawling house in Berkeley feels like a college dormitory, residents
everywhere, in pajamas, walking around, reading in their rooms. On a visit after
dinner the other day, Ms. Scott was sitting on a pink comforter at the foot of
her twin bed, watching Gov. Gray Davis on the news. She laughed and smiled and
teased her guests, making the universal sign for "you're crazy" -
spiraling her extended forefinger near her ear - and pointing at the person she
wanted to tease. Her
room was tidy and warm, decorated with photos of the Scott twins as children and
adults. Connie
Reyes, the house supervisor, said the only time Ms. Scott was ever cross was
when she was kept home from the center for a doctor's or dentist's appointment. Back
at her corner at Creative Growth in the morning, Ms. Scott was all business
again. She barely acknowledged her visitor and ignored one of her fellow
artists, Louie Esparte, as he sat across from her, showing off his drawings of
forest creatures and people. "This one is Judy Scott," Mr. Esparte
said, holding up a drawing of a woman with the name Judy Scott on her belt.
"Look, look," he said, trying to get Ms. Scott's attention with polite
waves. But it was lunch time and Ms. Scott was busy hiding her latest piece so
that she could eat.
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Last Update: 08/07/06 |