Judith Scott

Savannah Lane

Judith Scott was a fibers artist and was actively producing art from 1988 to 2005. She was born with Down Syndrome and became deaf through an illness in early childhood. She was institutionalized as a result of failing verbal aptitude tests and being disruptive in traditional classrooms. Scott's twin brought her home after the death of their parents and helped enroll her in her first formal art training in the mid-1980s when she enrolled at the Creative Growth Art Center. Scott quickly found her place in fibers and was a prolific artist producing over 200 works before her death in 2005. 
Her early work explored two objects wrapped together, and later works became larger scale -- working with everyday objects and large totems. She never repeated a color scheme exactly and used a large range of colored and textured threads in her work. The wrapped fibers around the work create meaningful patterns and both visual and physical texture. In this way, she is able to elevate the objects. She transformed some objects by wrapping them with multiple layers and changing the form and other objects she celebrated the existing shape and structure.

She was labeled an outsider artist because she did not ever receive formal training and was only taught fibers late in her life. People have rejected that label because of the stigma that that title carries, but it is intended to celebrate the barriers that Scott had to overcome to work in a fine art environment. Scott's first exhibition was in 1999. Her works have been in installations all over the world and stay in permanent collections in the Brooklyn Art Museum, Museum of Modern Art, the American Visionary Art Museum, Museum of American Folk Art, Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Oakland Museum, L’Aracine Musee D’Art Brut, Art Brut Connaissance & Diffusion Collection, Collection de L'art Brut. She continued to work five days a week until she passed in 2005.

Artists website: http://www.creativegrowth.org/artists/judith-scott/
Works from: https://www.artsy.net/artist/judith-scott
Extra information: https://fraenkelgallery.com/artists/judith-scott
Judith Scott and context: http://strabic.fr/Judith-Scott-Quelques-objets-secrets
Movies: “What’s Under Your Hat?”
              “Outsider: The Life and Art of Judith Scott”