Baltimore Museum of Art opening exhibit celebrating Joyce Scott: 'Walk a mile in My Dreams'
BALTIMORE - The Baltimore Museum of Art is opening a major retrospective of the work of legendary artist Joyce Scott starting on Sunday.
The Baltimore native has been making art that speaks truth to power for more than five decades.
"You can't be confounded by your gender or by your ethnicity or your age or your supposed disability," Scott said.
In all of her vibrancy, wisdom and womanhood, Scott, and her work, is an embodiment of the experience of Black women.
"I'm hoping people walk away with the knowledge that this life affords you everything if you're courageous enough to go after it," Scott said.
Scott's exhibit "Walk a mile in My Dreams" is a 50-year retrospective of nearly 140 objects, including quilts, textiles, bead and glass sculptures, performance footage and jewelry.
"Walking a mile in my dreams is following through and having new dreams," Scott said. "It's never to be suppressed in what I do, that there is not something wonderful and popping out and that I'm so hungry for it that I'm running after it."
"Getting over and through that fear of being yourself, that's a day-to-day thing," visitor Aya Dixon said.
On an exclusive tour for guests, Scott's wisdom of womanhood was profoundly impactful to those who held on to every word of her empowerment.
"The best way I can be an asset to my community is to be 100% authentic to who I am, and leaning into that, and I'm literally getting that in return," Dixon said. "It's like a reciprocal exchange of energies."
It's an energy that even in the midst of this vibrant work that empowers the strength and tenacity of women.
Scott said the charge is not only for women, but for all of the human race.
"We are partnered with men, so we must work together to make this different, so that young girls will have a better chance, and young boys will also," Scott said. "They will be united in power instead of separate."
Those are words that her mother, Elizabeth T. Scott, whose exhibit is already on display at the same museum, would surely be proud of by empowering everyone to lean into their dreams through their lived experience and never settling, but instead dreaming bigger.
"That's the thing about being in love with what you do, you go after the next thing," Scott said. "You're not scared of it and if you're scared, you work through your fears because what it offers to you is so magnanimous. Look at me."