American Craft

Honoring Accomplishments
By The Editors
October/November 2020
The Legacy Issue 

While so much is on pause in 2020, people across the country continue to practice their crafts. Indeed, craft offers much to culture and to our lives at this time, reminding us of the importance of slowing down, reconnecting to the creative spirit, transforming raw materials into objects with beauty and meaning, and experiencing the satisfaction that comes with making things with your own hands.

So, this year it is especially meaningful to us here at the American Craft Council – the nonprofit publisher of American Craft – to honor individuals and organizations for exceptional artistic, scholarly, and philanthropic contributions to the craft field. We are delighted to introduce you to the winners of the 2020 American Craft Council Awards.

With this award, five accomplished makers enter the ACC’s College of Fellows, which honors those who have demonstrated outstanding achievement in the field of craft for more than 25 years. These new members have been elected by their peers and other leaders in craft.

We also celebrate the Gold Medalist for Consummate Craftsmanship, a career-crowning honor reserved for a previously elected Fellow; an Honorary Fellow for scholarship; the winner of the Aileen Osborn Webb Award for Philanthropy; and the Award of Distinction, which goes to a craft museum this year.

We invite you to cozy up, make some tea, and fill your cup with inspiration as you meet this year’s awardees.

~The Editors

Joyce J. Scott
Gold Medal for Consummate Craftsmanship

Joyce J. Scott was born to make art. “People ask me how I started as an artist, and I tell them: ‘In utero. I came out of my mother’s womb. I had a little beret hat on. I was waving. I said to the doctor, ‘Move, you’re in my light.’ I think I had a cigarette and a martini, and I was ready,’” says Scott, this year’s recipient of the American Craft Council’s Gold Medal for Consummate Craftsmanship. “I don’t think I had a choice. My direction – my avatar, my point, that horizon – always had art splayed all over it.”

Scott, a 2016 MacArthur grantee, is a mixed-media visual and performance artist best known for figurative sculpture and jewelry made using free-form, off-loom bead-weaving techniques similar to the peyote stitch and its variations, as well as blown glass and found objects. She learned beadwork at age 5 from her mother, well-known art quilter Elizabeth Talford Scott, whom Scott refers to as “my first mentor.” “She created an environment that was very festive – always using her stitchery to make the house look better,” Scott says.

Scott’s parents were sharecroppers in North and South Carolina before they moved to Baltimore in the 1940s “to achieve a better life and not be eye to eye with the kind of overt racism that tracked you every moment of your life,” says Scott, who also calls Baltimore home. But racism didn’t disappear when they moved north. It simply took on a different shape, and her parents still experienced the limits of being Black in America. “My parents were upset because they didn’t have the ability to have an academic education, and then I came, and I was hungry for education,” she says. “They supported me in that. I had no reason to be anything other than what I wanted to be.”

And what Scott wanted to be was an artist. “I saw no other way to completely be Joyce. I saw no other realm that would allow me the freedom and the voice that I have.”

She earned a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1970 and an MFA from the Instituto Allende in Mexico in 1971. She learned the peyote stitch, or diagonal weaving, from a Native American student at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine in 1976, and it became central to her beadwork. Scott’s oeuvre blurs lines between the materials often associated with “craft” and those associated with “fine art,” and it crosses styles and mediums, from jewelry to large-scale outdoor installations.

And what Scott wanted to be was an artist. “I saw no other way to completely be Joyce. I saw no other realm that would allow me the freedom and the voice that I have.”

She earned a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1970 and an MFA from the Instituto Allende in Mexico in 1971. She learned the peyote stitch, or diagonal weaving, from a Native American student at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine in 1976, and it became central to her beadwork. Scott’s oeuvre blurs lines between the materials often associated with “craft” and those associated with “fine art,” and it crosses styles and mediums, from jewelry to large-scale outdoor installations.

During the past 50 years, she’s been prolific – a fact that has become even more pronounced during the COVID-19 pandemic. “I’m 72 now, so there’s no way I’m leaving my house. I’ve just been making things – sculpture, jewelry, a teapot. I’m making a big red monkey,” she says with a laugh. “I’m like the little boy in that movie Home Alone. I’m wandering around, getting into trouble in my own house.”

Scott won the MacArthur at age 68, and she considers it a monumental moment – in large part because of where she was in her career. “People generally get the MacArthur when they are younger, not this age. It really is money that says, ‘We are investing in your career, in your future, in what you may become,’” she says. So, to have the Fellowship committee acknowledge her future work “really buoyed me and made a difference.”

As an African American and a feminist, Scott confronts difficult themes in her pieces, including race, misogyny, sexuality, stereotypes, gender in-equality, social disturbance, economic disparities, history, politics, rape, and discrimination. With this work, she aims to make a difference in the world. “I’d like my art to induce people to stop raping, torturing, and shooting each other,” she says. “I don’t have the ability to end violence, racism, and sexism, but my art can help people look and think.”