Scott’s fluid and free-spirited work—which also includes forays into comedy, music, theater, and performance of other kinds—is on full view in “Walk a Mile in My Dreams,” a retrospective currently at the Baltimore Museum of Art through July 14. The 75-year-old artist, who has called Charm City her home since childhood, is showing some 140 works spanning more than 50 years. Below, Scott discusses her hometown history, her capacity for craft, and how she’s navigated an evolving art world over the decades.

How has Baltimore informed and guided who you are as an artist?

My parents were sharecroppers from North and South Carolina who came to the “Up South” during the Great Migration. They got to Baltimore, and it allowed them to have a bit more agency and power in their lives. This city offered them the possibility of giving me the life that I have—the ability to become a MacArthur fellow and have a 50-year retrospective.

When I was growing up, Baltimore was much more prosperous than it is now. Unfortunately, stories these days are always showing boarded houses and Black men standing on the corner, but that’s only a pittance of what the city is really about. Baltimore, for me, is a city of largesse. When you are loved in Baltimore, it’s the best. You’re in a city filled with joy, filthy with artists, and packed with angst.

Your exhibition coincides with a Baltimore Museum show devoted to your mother, the late artist Elizabeth Talford Scott, who is also being celebrated with shows at eight other museums and colleges across the city. What does it mean to you to be showing your art along with hers?

It really speaks to a Baltimore ethos, where I, as a fabulous African American woman at three-quarters of a century old, get to do this. I was like, “What the fuck?!” (I cuss a lot, and I’m trying not to.) These young curators have given such deference to my mother and know things they probably shouldn’t. When you walk through my mother’s exhibition at the Baltimore Museum, it is mounted beautifully, and you are made aware of the consummate dignity and stank—that’s not stink but stank—and regality and oomph that my mother’s work has.

What’s something your mother taught you that has stuck with you?

The voice that I hear from my mother—she talks to me all the time, that rascal—says, “You’re worthy. And if you want it, go get it. Never stop.” We used to talk about having just one life. I, who have had some infractions in this life, probably will be reborn as a bee or as a bodily fluid—as something terrible. But as long as I’m a human being, I’m running it down. She packed me full of self-awareness, self-assuredness, and the ability to know that if this is it, I’m running for it. I’m not going to stop. And that is ever present in my artwork.

Your show opens with a newly commissioned installation titled The Threads That Unite My Seat to Knowledge (2024). Why did you want to begin with that?

This is one of my cockamamie ideas. I decided to make a dwelling that represents not only me and my brain but also the cozy, comfortable environment in which I grew up and became this person. On the outside are quilts made by my mother, grandmother, grandfather, and godmother because they swaddled me in my youth and gave me a lot of love. When I dreamed, I was on a magic carpet under those things.

Inside that installation, I’m showing large beaded pieces that talk about translucency and color—and just ass-kicking. There is a chair where I might sit if I’m in the museum, and tell stories and sing and talk. My mom brought me to the Baltimore Museum when I was a kid, when [Auguste Rodin’s] Thinker was still outside. You could jump all over him and try to find his genitalia and then walk up all those steps through the front door. The museum was one of my seats of knowledge. It was a place where I could perambulate and touch things I’m not supposed to. So it’s proper and apropos—and all those words—that I should be able to sit in this joint and disperse some common knowledge.

The title of the show alludes to a performance piece of yours called Walk a Mile in My Drawers (2006). What is the significance of that work to you?

The first retrospective I did here [at the BMA in 2000] was called “Kickin’ It with the Old Masters.” It was funny because when we were talking about it, people would say, “Do you really want to say masters?” This [new title] is a way to talk about the many facets of what I do as a performer, singer, and theater person, as well as a visual artist and an educator. Walk a Mile in My Drawers was a funny bon mot about fatness, about big girls, sexuality, all that stuff. “Walk a Mile in My Dreams” is about how I shall not be denied.

I’ve been loved. I’ve been given the fodder I need, and the nourishment. Some of that was money and food, but a lot of it was that little extra kick you need to take the next step—someone imparting knowledge to me and not making me feel either stupid or wrong to ask questions. To receive that is a big deal. And I would be remiss if I didn’t include race in this, because that can make it a really arduous task to exhibit work about social and cultural stuff and also use materials that people don’t necessarily understand as art. I’m a craftsperson and an artist all rolled into one. But people bemoan me saying I’m a craftsperson. “What?! Are you going to sing a Negro spiritual?” Well, I just might! I’m overwhelmed by this retrospective because it allows me to look at how I’ve walked so many miles in my dreams—and how I continue to do that.

You’ve made so many different kinds of art over 50 years. Are you surprised by any of your work? Are there things you can barely believe you made?

It’s the amount of work. If I make 10 necklaces a year and 10 sculptures, that’s 20 pieces of art. Multiply that by 50. And that’s a low number! And while I was doing that for a long time I traveled as a performer with Kay Lawal-Muhammad as the [variety act] Thunder Thigh Revue. I look back at that and think, Who the hell is that person?! Isn’t it wonderful that I wasn’t dissuaded and didn’t succumb to my fears—that I just kept walking?

How do you remember the Thunder Thigh Revue?

This was in the mid-’80s into the ’90s, at a time when Whoopi Goldberg was golden, and people like Mort Sahl—monologuists—talked about really heavy subjects in a comedic manner. It was a real adventure. We would do bits. We realized there were things that we needed to say, and we wanted to say them in a way that the audience would actually listen. A lot of our work was about being accepted for who you are. It was about larger women, about large Black women, about immigration; anything we heard, we went after. A lot of it was about who the messenger is and listening to what that messenger has to say. Because incumbent in that was our ethnicity, our weight, our gender, our class: you name it. That was very important for us.

It was also a kind of feminism for us. But we kept our clothes on. It was different than what I see young women doing now, shaking their butts and whatever. We were very aware of who was looking at us, because the majority of the time our audience was not 50 percent Black. We were very aware of the message we were sending out and what we looked like. We were aware that some of the “demons” we were talking about were sitting in the audience and lasciviously wondering what’s under that lace bustier. One of the things we always were tackling was how not to pander to that—to be real and true and honest. That’s very relevant in my artwork as well.

In the past few years there’s been a shift in terms of attention paid to African American art. How different or the same does it feel to you now?

I talk with friends sometimes and we say, “Didn’t this happen in the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s, when African Americans were everything, and everybody had on kente cloth and big afros? And everybody was an Indigenous person wearing bead work and whatever was the flavor of the month?” For me the real difference is that the folks who are doing it now are not 20th-century people. They’re 21st-century people who are part of a more global society. These kids aren’t who I was. They are very different people. The abundance of knowledge and accessibility that we really had to work for in the past is at their fingertips. And there are many, many more well-educated people of color. There’s still not enough, ever. But we have great examples.

You’ve done beaded works, blown glass, and worked with all kinds of different materials. Is there one way of working with which you have a special kinship?

Beadwork. I insinuate beads into anything. If I could make an edible bead and we could sprinkle it on top of ice cream, I would bead in a beautiful design, and then we’d eat it. It is a mesmerizing technique. My mother’s side of the family were craftspeople: basket workers, clay people, weavers, all kinds of things. One of the reasons I chose beads is because I could afford them. I could carry them with me, and they weren’t toxic—unless I ate them. The more I learned about them, the more I realized I had the facility to bend them to my will. And they are my lingua franca as a teacher. They’re one of those things you can teach, and while you’re working with your hands, you can talk to people about history, about power—you can apply it to just about everything.

What made you inclined to work across so many different art forms?

I took advantage of every opportunity. I was so hungry for knowledge. If knowledge is truly cumulative, then being able to relay and pile on from the past and also unite that with what’s happening now … If I live, what the hell will I be doing in 2030? I’ll be in a wheelchair, but I’ll be rocking, baby. 

Photographer unknown, Mind Crime Hookers party crew on 6th Street Bridge, Boyle Heights, 1993, in “Guadalupe Rosales: Legends Never Die, A Collective Memory,” at Aperture Foundation.

COURTESY GUADALUPE ROSALES

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 25

Reading: Rodney Koeneke and Fred Moten at Dia Art Foundation
This reading brings together two writers whose work has been influential for a coterie of young artists. Koeneke’s work often focuses on the ways in which seemingly anonymous forms of writing bring together groups of people—his latest book, Body & Glass, came out earlier this year. Moten, who was profiled by ARTnews earlier this year, recently completed the series of books “consent not to be a single being,” which focuses on uncertainty and notions of blackness; he and Stefano Harvey are currently working on All Incomplete, a new book due out next year.
Dia Art Foundation, 535 West 22nd Street, 5th Floor, 6:30 p.m.

I.B. TAURIS

Talk: Barbara Pollack at Pace Gallery
At this event, Barbara Pollack will discuss her new book, Brand New Art from China: A Generation on the Rise, which focuses on the Chinese contemporary art world. Pollack, a longtime ARTnews contributor who has profiled collector Michael Xufu Huang and artists Ai Weiwei and Liu Wei, among many others, has written extensively about the nation’s art scene. Her talk will partially address Zhang Xiaogang, whose work can currently be seen at Pace Gallery.
Pace Gallery, 537 West 24th Street, 6:30 p.m. Free with RSVP to rsvp@pacegallery.com

Opening: Guadalupe Rosales at Aperture Foundation
For the past few years, Guadalupe Rosales has been amassing an archive of photographs related to Latinx and Chicanx culture in Los Angeles in an attempt, she has said, to reclaim stereotypes about brown men, women, and kids in the city. Occasionally, Rosales has posted some of her images to two cult-favorite Instagram accounts—Veteranas & Rucas and Map Pointz—but rarely has her work been shown in New York. With one of her photographs featured prominently on the cover of the new issue of Aperture, the foundation that prints the magazine will show an installation of images Rosales has collected. At the opening for the show, Rosales will give a talk about her work.
Aperture Foundation, 547 West 27th Street, 4th Floor, 7 p.m.

Sarah Lucas, Selfish in Bed II, 2000, digital print.

©SARAH LUCAS/COURTESY SADIE COLES HQ, LONDON

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 26

Exhibition: Sarah Lucas at New Museum
The first U.S. survey for the British artist, “Au Naturel,” will present over 150 works across the museum’s three main floors. The robust show brings together sculptures, photographs, and installations from various points in Lucas’s career, including her biomorphic “Bunnies,” “NUDS,” and “Penetralia” series. The artist—whose bold and witty output has long focused on the human body, gender, sexuality, and identity—has made new works for this New Museum show.
New Museum, 235 Bowery, 11 a.m.—6 p.m.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 27

Joyce J. Scott, Breathe, 2014, hand-blown Murano glass, beads and thread.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND PETER BLUM GALLERY, NEW YORK

Opening: Joyce J. Scott at Peter Blum Gallery
“What Next and Why Not,” Joyce J. Scott’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, will showcase about 20 sculptures made since the year 2000. The artist incorporates beading, blown glass, and found objects in her artworks, which often ruminate on history, race, gender, and violence. The works on view evidence Scott’s interests in many cultural and spiritual traditions—West African Yoruba weaving and Buddhism are among the reference points. The exhibition, which follows on the heels of a Scott survey at Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, New Jersey, earlier this year is her first New York show in 20 years.
Peter Blum Gallery, 176 Grand Street, 6—8 p.m.

Opening: Marcia Hafif at Fergus McCaffrey
“Marcia Hafif Remembered” commemorates and pays homage to the work of the pioneering abstractionist who died earlier this year at age 88. Best known for her monochrome paintings that were concerned with her medium’s process and materials, Hafif, who first got noticed by critics during the 1970s, worked under the assumption that abstraction wasn’t dead. If anything, she believed, it was entering a new, more exciting phase. This exhibition—which was co-curated by the artist’s friends Alanna Heiss, Richard Nonas, and Hanne Tierney—aims to survey the artist’s output, with works from her “Double Glaze” series, a selection of her “Black Paintings,” and her 1991 piece Table of Pigments represented.
Fergus McCaffrey, 514 West 26th Street, 6—8 p.m.

Opening: Dr. Lakra at White Columns
The Oaxaca, Mexico–based visual artist and tattooist Dr. Lakra (né Jerónimo López Ramírez) is known for taking vintage magazine prints of pin-up girls and wrestlers, and tattooing them on people’s skin using pen ink. This exhibition, which was co-organized with Kurimanzutto gallery, of Mexico City and New York, will showcase a less flashy part of the artist’s oeuvre: his collages, for which he has modified portraits of revered historical figures, among them René Descartes and others of his ilk, using an arsenal of found images, including comic-book clippings and fragments of vintage anatomy texts. The portraits blur the boundary between “the comedic and the grotesque,” according to a release.
White Columns, 91 Horatio Street, 6–8 p.m.

Talk: Faith Ringgold at Brooklyn Museum
As part of the programming for the Brooklyn Museum show “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” Faith Ringgold will discuss her career as an artist, activist, and educator. Having been in an integral force in alerting the New York art world to various inequities, Ringgold, who was profiled in these pages in 2016, has tackled issues such as racial violence and immigration using a range of mediums that includes stretched canvas and quilts. The subject of family will likely come up at the talk—Ringgold will be joined by her daughter, author and cultural critic Michele Wallace.
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, 7–9 p.m. Tickets $14/$16

Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing #289, 1976, wax crayon, graphite pencil, and paint on four walls, in “Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018,” at Whitney Museum.

©2018 SOL LEWITT AND ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 28

Exhibition: “Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018” at Whitney Museum
This show will feature more than 50 works from 39 artists, all of them involving computer code or instructions. The exhibition is divided into two groups of work—“Rule, Instruction and Algorithm” and “Signal, Sequence and Resolution”; its centerpiece will be a newly restored Nam June Paik sculpture, Fin de Siècle II (1989), which is composed of more than 200 television sets. Christiane Paul, the show’s co-curator, said in a statement that the exhibition “strives to illustrate how art throughout the decades has been informed by technological and mathematical concepts and to provide insight into the increasingly coded structures of the contemporary landscape.”
Whitney Museum, 99 Gansevoort Street, 10:30 a.m.–10 p.m.

An artist in Graffiti Alley, located in the city’s North Arts District.

Scattered around downtown Baltimore are benches emblazoned with the phrase “Baltimore: The Greatest City in America.” By contrast, the novelist Richard Price once proclaimed the city to be “Chaos Theory incarnate.” In conversation with its inhabitants, you are likely to hear words like “lopsided” and “idiosyncratic.” But Baltimore boasts a tight-knit arts scene that is thriving. “There’s a true support system here,” said Amy Eva Raehse, director of the gallery Goya Contemporary. “In other cities people seem to be competing for success. The art community in Baltimore seems to be moving forward together.” This coming fall, the director and artist John Waters, the bard of Baltimore, will have a career retrospective at the Baltimore Museum of Art titled “John Waters: Indecent Exposure.” ARTnews paid a visit to him as well as other artists and spaces that put the charm in Charm City.

ALL IMAGES: ©KATHERINE MCMAHON

John Waters

“It’s as if every eccentric in the South decided to move north, ran out of gas, and decided to stay,” John Waters said of his hometown. Born in Baltimore and closely associated with it ever since, Waters had his first experiences of art at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the very museum that will soon host his retrospective. “The first thing I ever bought with my own money was a Miró print at the BMA gift shop when I was ten years old,” he said. “I hung it up and all the kids were like ‘Ewww, that’s ugly!’ I saw the power of art and how it infuriated people. I was immediately drawn.” About his city, he added, “I don’t think Baltimore has an inferiority complex anymore, but it’s still cheap enough to have a bohemia and it has the best sense of humor about itself of any town.”

Joyce J. Scott

The sculptor, printmaker, performance artist, and jewelry designer Joyce J. Scott has lived in her West Baltimore home for more than 40 years. “I’m a neighborhood ‘around the way girl,’ but I aspired to global knowledge.” Though she has traveled extensively, she feels a sense of responsibility to her home city. “Any postindustrial city is having trials about race, economics, and class,” she said. “If art is part of social justice, we artists will keep doing what we’re doing. It’s not only good for the artist but for the entire community.” Scott, who was awarded a MacArthur “genius grant” in 2016, is currently the subject of a solo exhibition at Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, New Jersey. She will have her first solo show in New York in 20 years at Peter Blum Gallery in September.

Matmos

The conceptually inclined musical duo Matmos—Drew Daniel and M. C. Schmidt—have lived in Baltimore since moving from San Francisco nine years ago. A stark difference they noticed was in cost of living. “It’s a city where you can’t ignore the differences and distortions that wealth produces,” Daniel said. “The structure that makes it affordable is part of a longer story about other people’s poverty—you’re enmeshed with that. It’s always in this weird state of life-death.” In a basement studio at their row house in Charles Village, Matmos is currently working on a new album using only sounds generated with plastic, including a police shield they found on eBay.

Tarantula Hill

“This building is a mystical spot,” said Twig Harper, who purchased the 5,000-square-foot West Baltimore edifice that would come to be known as the eclectic live/work space Tarantula Hill. “If you can make something happen in a void where everything’s been sucked out, it’s more vital than having institutional support.” Harper—who also makes noise music and rents time in his in-house sensory-deprivation tank—shares the space with the textile artist April Camlin, photographer Lindsay Bottos, and performance artist Michael Wasteneys Stephens. About the Baltimore art scene, Camlin said, “It’s harder to find a commercial gallery here—most of the galleries are artist-run. It’s not as conducive to making money off your practice, but there are a lot of opportunities.”

Resort

In the wake of Nudashank, a dynamic and catalyzing gallery they ran together for four years, Alex Ebstein and Seth Adelsberger recently debuted their new Resort gallery on the ground floor of a three-story building in the Bromo Arts District. “There are a lot of large spaces and a lot of people here for the academic art community who stay and make ambitious work because they have the space to do so,” Ebstein said. In addition to their duties at the gallery—whose next exhibition, a group show titled “Noise Margins,” opens in late March—Ebstein and Adelsberger are both also practicing artists. “Even though we’re not at the center of the market,” Ebstein said, “it continues to be inspiring to live and work here.”

Carolyn Case

Painter Carolyn Case has been a big part of the Baltimore art scene as it has grown in the two decades since she moved for grad school and ultimately came to teach at the Maryland Institute College of Art, one of the oldest art schools in the country. “A lot of funding for the arts has been an excellent development,” she said, “as have grants for small independent galleries, which have helped stabilize them.” She also credited free-admission policies at the Baltimore Museum and the Walters Art Museum for creating accessibility, and spoke of inspiration she finds for paintings of her own in an aging urban landscape. “This city has lots of painted-over textures: thin coats over corrugated metal, delicate layers over structures that feel weighty.”