John T. Scott (1940-2007)

Scott was born in New Orleans, LA, and studied at Xavier University, New Orleans, (BFA, 1962) and then Michigan State University (MFA, 1965). He became a professor of art at his alma mater, Xavier, after completing graduate school. 

John T. Scott’s abstract sculptures of painted steel and aluminum use tension—formal, technical, and conceptual—as the structuring principle behind works that, while derived from the uniqueness of the artist’s New Orleans-based African American cultural experience, convey universal resonance through the suggestion of ritual. 

St James Guide to Black Artists, Nicole Gilpin, p. 474

The year both of these works were executed, 1984, Scott was invited by kinetic sculptor, George Rickey, to spend six weeks working at the Hand Hollow Foundation in East Chatham, New York. Scott’s interest in moving sculpture was encouraged by Rickey, and he used the time to develop what he called a “kinetic vocabulary”. The previous year, Scott worked as the chief designer for the African American pavilion for the 1984 Louisiana World Exposition.

Yvonne Edwards-Tucker wrote in the International Review of African American Art (vol 6, no. 2; p. 42) about Scott’s work following his exposure to Rickey:

His newest works consist of intricately and exquisitely crafted wood and metal sculptures. This series…carries a sacredly/serious multiple reference to a type of curved African stringed instrument originally fashioned by the hunter from his bow and arrow to assuage his remorse after the kill; and to the McComb Mississippi Delta folk music associated with the pounding rhythms of blues guitarist, Bo Diddley. These delicately balanced, open, linear sculptures, sensitive to the slightest changes in wind movements, are more obliquely abstract than his previous static sculpture—and yet, they remain strongly welded to the same roots, thematically.

The diddie bow, as it was called, was an African myth, which involved the hunter restringing the bow used to kill an animal and then playing a lyrical memorial to its spirit. It spoke to Scott formally as a visual tool and culturally as a reclamation of African history that also suggested the significance of music to the African American experience. (Gilpin, p. 474)

Scott’s work is included in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art; Fisk University; Florida A&M University; Michigan State University; National Museum of American Art,; Loyola