Joyce J. Scott (born 1948) is an African-American artist, sculptor, quilter, performance artist, installation artist, print-maker, lecturer and educator. Named a MacArthur Fellow in 2016, and a Smithsonian Visionary Artist in 2019, Scott is best known for her figurative sculptures and jewelry using free form, off-loom beadweaving techniques, similar to a peyote stitch. Each piece is often constructed using thousands of glass seed beads or pony beads, and sometimes other found objects or materials such as glass, quilting and leather. In 2018, she was hailed for working in new medium — a mixture of soil, clay, straw, and cement — for a sculpture meant to disintegrate and return to the earth. Scott is influenced by a variety of diverse cultures, including Native American and African traditions, Mexican, Czech, and Russian beadwork, illustration and comic books, and pop culture. Scott is renowned for her social commentary on issues such as racism, classism, sexism, violence, and cultural stereotypes, as well as themes of spiritual healing. Her work is about how Scott sees herself in a rapidly changing world: "These works are about personal growth, personal epiphanies and how not to get stuck in the easy ways of life- about art I am fairly fearless but in everyday life I am not." Biography Joyce Jane Scott was born in Baltimore in 1948, the daughter of noted quilt maker Elizabeth Talford Scott and Charlie Scott Jr. She has described herself as "a true Baltimore babe and Sandtown girl" and has lived in a row house in the Sandtown neighborhood for more than four decades. Her mother encouraged her creativity and Scott began drawing at the Coppin Demonstration School, a public education institution, and later attended Lemmel Middle School and Eastern High School in Baltimore. She graduated with Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1970, and then earned a Masters of Fine Arts from the Instituto Allende in Mexico. Later, Scott pursued further education at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine. Scott's own mother was an artist who taught Scott appliqué quilting techniques and encouraged her to pursue her career as an artist. One of her earliest artistic endeavors was sewing doll clothes. Scott is also influenced by craft traditions in her extended family of "quilters, woodworkers, basketweavers, chair caners, planters and blacksmiths," where people developed skills in more than