John T. Scott, a New Orleans sculptor whose vibrantly colored kinetic art filtered the spirit of the African diaspora through a modernist lens, died on Saturday in Houston. He was 67 and had fled his home city just before Hurricane Katrina hit two years ago.

His death was confirmed by Ron Bechet, an artist and professor at Xavier University in New Orleans, where Mr. Scott had taught for 40 years. Mr. Bechet added that Mr. Scott had been chronically ill with pulmonary fibrosis and was recovering from a double lung transplant.

John T. Scott was born on a farm in the Gentilly section of New Orleans and raised in the city’s Lower Ninth Ward. He said that his art training began at home, when he learned embroidery from his mother; his father was a chauffeur and restaurant cook. He attended Xavier, a Roman Catholic and historically black college, and then Michigan State University, where he studied with the painter Charles Pollock, Jackson Pollock’s brother. After completing his master of fine arts degree in 1965, he returned to Xavier to teach.

Mr. Scott’s earliest work drew on Christian religious imagery and classical mythology. But by the late 1960s, his sculpture and prints focused on African, African-American, Caribbean and Southern Creole cultures, reflecting their fusion in New Orleans itself. His assemblage style and welding technique were influenced by the playful but subtly structured dynamics of jazz as well as by dance. From the 1980s onward, with encouragement from the sculptor George Rickey, his half-abstract, boldly painted sculptures in metal and wood included kinetic components.

His “Diddlie Bow Series” (1983-84) was based on the attenuated shape of an African stringed instrument. His environmentally conceived “Circle Dance Series” (2001), inspired by African dances that were transformed into slaves’ courting rituals and that survive in New Orleans funeral processions, was described by the art historian Richard J. Powell as “a kind of stylized stageset/dreamworld.”

His work in the 1990s, particularly his prints, took an increasingly dark view of urban excess and violence.

In 1992, Mr. Scott was awarded a “genius” grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and he used the money to build a larger studio. He produced several monumental site-specific sculptures for the city, among them “Spiritgate” (1994) for the entrance court to the New Orleans Museum of Art. In 2005, the museum mounted a career retrospective, “Circle Dance: The Art of John T. Scott.” He was represented by the Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans and by Harris Brown Gallery in Boston.

After fleeing New Orleans, he stayed in Houston to await a bilateral lung transplant. He underwent surgery twice in April and remained in the hospital and a rehabilitation facility.

Both his home and studio in New Orleans suffered storm damage, and the studio was broken into three times. Much of his sculpture-making equipment was taken, as were metal sculptures, possibly to be broken and sold for scrap.

Mr. Scott is survived by his wife, Anna Rita Scott; a son, Ayo, of New Orleans; four daughters, Maria Scott-Osborne of Boston and Tyra Joseph, Lauren Kannady and Alanda Rhodes, all of Houston; and six granddaughters.

In June, having regained some energy, Mr. Scott spoke with Doug MacCash of The New Orleans Times-Picayune. Asked whether he intended to return to the city after recovering from surgery, he said: “That’s the only home I know. I want my bones to be buried there. I belong there. I need New Orleans more than New Orleans needs me.”

Source: New York Times

Catlett was born in Washington, D.C., the youngest of three children. Both of her parents were teachers.

She attended the Lucretia Mott Elementary School, Dunbar High School, and then Howard University where she studied design, printmaking and drawing. In an interview in December 1981 in Artist and Influence magazine, she stated that she changed her major to painting because of the influence of James A. Porter, and because there was no sculpture division at Howard at the time. She received her BS cum laude from Howard in 1935. She then worked as a high school teacher in North Carolina but left after two years, frustrated by the low teaching salaries for black people.

While living and working in Harlem, New York, she was briefly married to Charles White.

In 1947, she married Mexican artist Francisco Mora, and made Mexico her permanent home, later becoming a Mexican citizen. They have three sons, including film director Juan Mora. Her granddaughter, Naima Mora, was the Cycle 4 winner of the America’s Next Top Model television show. Catlett’s sculpture, “Naima”, is of Naima as a child.

Since retiring in 1975, she continues to be active in the Cuernavaca, Mexico art community.

Education

In 1940 Catlett became the first student to receive an M.F.A. in sculpture at the University of Iowa. While there, she was influenced by American landscape painter Grant Wood, who urged students to work with the subjects they knew best. For Catlett, this meant black people, and especially black women, and it was at this point that her work began to focus on African Americans. Her piece Mother and Child, done in limestone in 1939 for her thesis,[1] won first prize in sculpture at the American Negro Exposition in Chicago in 1940.

She studied ceramics at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1941, lithography at the Art Students League of New York in 1942-1943, and with sculptor Ossip Zadkine in New York in 1943.

Career

Catlett became the ‘promotion director’ for the George Washington Carver School in Harlem located at 57 W. 125th St. Roy DeCarava was one of the students. Some of the teachers included Ernest Crichlow, Norman Lewis, and Charles White, who was for a time her husband.

In 1946 Catlett received a Rosenwald Fund Fellowship that allowed her to travel to Mexico where she studied wood carving with Jose L. Ruiz and ceramic sculpture with Francisco Zúñiga, at the Escuela de Pintura y Escultura, Esmeralda, Mexico. She later moved, to Mexico, married, and became a Mexican citizen.

In Mexico, she worked with the Taller de Gráfica Popular, (People’s Graphic Arts Workshop), a group of printmakers organized in 1936 and dedicated to using their art to promote social change. There she and other artists created a series of linoleum cuts on black heroes. They “did posters, leaflets, collective booklets, illustrations for textbooks, posters and illustrations for the construction of schools, against illiteracy in Mexico.”

She became the first female professor of sculpture and head of the sculpture department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, School of Fine Arts, San Carlos, in Mexico City, in 1958, and taught there until retiring in 1975. She continues to be active in the art community of Cuernavaca, Morelos.

Awards

She has received numerous awards including the Women’s Caucus For Art. The Graphic Arts Workshop has won an international peace prize. An Elizabeth Catlett Week was proclaimed in Berkeley, California, and an Elizabeth Catlett Day in Cleveland, Ohio. She is an honorary citizen of New Orleans and has received the keys to many cities. She received an honorary Doctorate from Pace University, in New York and was accompanied to the presentation by fellow sculptor and good friend Manuel Bennett.

Works
Sharecropper, 1952, printed 1970

Some of her best-known prints are Sharecropper (1968 or 1970) and Malcolm X Speaks for Us (1969). Well-known sculptured pieces include Dancing Figure (1961), The Black Woman Speaks and Target (1970), and The Singing Head. The National Council of Negro Women in New York City commissioned her to create a bronze sculpture, and her bronze relief adorns the Chemical Engineering Building at Howard University. In 2003 Catlett designed a memorial to author Ralph Ellison, which stands in West Harlem, NY.

She has created numerous outdoor sculptures which are displayed in Mexico; in Jackson, Mississippi; New Orleans, LA; and, Washington, D.C. She is represented in many collections through the world including the Institute of Fine Arts, Mexico, the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Museum of Modern Art, Mexico; National Museum of Prague; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C; State University of Iowa; Howard University; Fisk University; Atlanta University; the Barnett-Aden Collection, Tampa, Fl.; Schomburg Collection, NY; Rothman Gallery, L.A.; Museum of New Orleans, High Museum, Atlanta; and the Metropolitan Museum, NY.

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William Edmondson was born around 1874 in Davidson County, Tennessee. The exact year of his birth is not certain because of a fire that destroyed the family Bible. He was one of the six children of George and Jane Edmondson. He grew up in Nashville and started working at the age of sixteen. During these years, he worked as a manual laborer, fireman, railroad man at St. Louis Railroad, and hospital janitor at Women’s hospital. He performed these menial jobs for almost twenty five years. He never learned how to read or write. He did not marry anyone and shared the family home with his mother and unmarried sister after his father’s death. Following the deaths of his mother and sister and his retirement from hospital in 1932, he did some part-time jobs, sold vegetables that he grew in his backyard and lived alone for the rest of his life.

He became a convert around 1934 and attended United Primitive Church and remained dedicated to his religion. Edmondson entered the world of sculpture by a divine command. He received a vision from God, who told him to start sculpting. He began his career by working on tombstones. He worked exclusively with limestones which were delivered to him by the wrecking companies’ trucks. His work was influenced by the United Primitive Baptist Church ideas. His sculptures are simple and emphatic forms ranging from one to three feet in height. He carved the figures biblical characters, angels, doves, women, turtles, American eagles, rabbits, horses and other critters and “miracles”. He sold his sculptures along with selling vegetables. He also frequently provided tombstones for members of Nashville’s Afro-American Community.

About five years later, his art was recognized by Sidney Hirsch, Alfred and Elizabeth Starr, and Louise Dahl-Wolfe. Dahl-Wolfe was a photographer working for Harper’s Bazaar Magazine. She brought Edmondson’s sculptures to the attention of Alfred Barr, who was the director of the Museum of Modern Art at New York. They expressed interest in his work and Edmondson was accorded a one-man show at that Museum in 1937.

In 1938, his sculpture was included in the “Three Centuries of Art in the United States”. Then in 1941, he was also given a one-man show at the Nashville Art Gallery. His pieces were included in other art exhibits in the nation.

Edmondson’s career lasted for about fifteen years. During some of these years, he worked under the Works Progress Administration, a government sponsored artists’ relief program. However, he was free to create carvings of his choice. In the 1940s, his health began to fail and he had cancer. During the last few years of his life, he worked with small blocks of limestone. He died on February 8, 1951 in Nashville, TN. He was buried in an unmarked grave in Mt. Ararat Cemetery in Nashville.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

She was born Mary Edmonia Lewis in July 1845 in Albany, New York. Her inspiration for most her artwork came from her ethnic background. Lewis’s father was African American while her mother was Native American, of the Chippewa nation. Both her parents died when she was a child; her exact age was unknown at the time of their deaths. Lewis and her older brother resided with their mother’s family in Niagara Falls. Three years later, instead of working within the home, Lewis’s brother suggested she enroll in school.

She was then accepted and attended Oberlin Preparatory College in Ohio. Oberlin College was one of the first higher learning institutions in the United States to admit women of different races. Lewis’ decision to attend Oberlin was one that would significantly change her life. It was at Oberlin College where Lewis began to be interested in sculpting and began her art career.

After college, Lewis moved to Boston where her sculpting continued to developed. She began to study under a well-known and developed sculptor, Edmund Brackett. While working with Brackett in Boston, Lewis met Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, a commander during the Civil War, and did a sculpture of him. She moved to Rome in 1865 to continue her study and practice of sculpting.

During her time in Rome, Lewis mastered her practice and specialized in portrait busts, from the shoulders and up. She set up her own studio in Rome and became a very well known sculptor. Some have speculated that what contributed to Lewis’s success in Rome may have been her exotic appearance. People were intrigued and fascinated with her East Indian resemblance and wanted to know more about her. This was quite the opposite from the attention she initially received from the United States. Her diverse background worked for her rather than against her. [1] Rome was where Lewis spent most of her adult career but she eventually came back to the United States. Her studies in Rome contributed to her neoclassical techniques and subject matter. Her surroundings of the classical world greatly inspired Lewis and influenced her work. Lewis recreated the classical art style in her own work. For instance, she presented people in her sculptures as draped in robes rather than in contemporary clothing.

Shortly after, Lewis came back to the United States where she continued to sculpt. Her work sold for large sums of money. In 1873 an article in the New Orleans Picayune stated, “Edmonia Lewis had snared two 50,000 dollar commissions.” Her new-found popularity made her studio a tourist destination. Lewis sculpted many portrait busts of important figures during that time period. Her portrait busts included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (an American poet), John Brown (an abolitionist), Charles Sumner (an American politician), Abraham Lincoln (an American President), and Wendell Phillips (an American writer). Her sculpture of Longfellow was placed at Harvard University in their Wilderner Library.

In addition to her portrait busts, Lewis was well known for her complete figure sculptures, including (but not limited to) Hagar in the Wilderness (1866), Hiawatha (1865), The Marriage of Hiawatha (1865), The Departure of Hiawatha (1867), Madonna and Child (1867), and The Death of Cleopatra (1867).

Her Forever Free sculpture is one of her most famous and influential works. This was a representation of a free African-American couple in broken chains after the Civil War. This was one of the many pieces Lewis created that expressed a political statement.

Lewis had several exhibitions during her rise to fame. One was in Chicago, Illinois in 1870, another in Rome in 1871, and another was at the Centennial Celebration in Philadelphia in 1876. Both Lewis and Richard Bannister, another African-American artist, received honors at the Philadelphia Centennial Celebration.

In the late 1880s, the neoclassical genre became less popular, and Lewis’s popularity also declined. She became eclipsed by history and lost fame. The events of her later years are uncertain. Although the year of her death is debatable, many believe Lewis died in 1890. Lewis never married and had no known children.

Incident at Oberlin College

During the winter season of 1862, just several months after the start of the Civil War, while Edmonia Lewis attended Oberlin College, there was an incident which involved her and two classmates, Maria Miles and Christina Ennes. The three women planned go sleigh riding later that day. Lewis invited her friends to her home for a drink. Shortly after, Miles and Ennes fell severely ill. Doctors concluded that the two women had some sort of poison in their system and were not sure if they would survive. Days later, it was apparent that the two women would recover from the incident and because of their recovery, the authorities took no action.

However, townspeople took matters in their own hands. Walking home alone one night, Lewis was dragged into an open field and badly beaten.[5] Those responsible for her injuries were never found.[6] Due to the attack, local authorities arrested Lewis, charging her with poisoning her friends. The college defended their student throughout the trial. John Mercer Langston, an Oberlin College alum, and only practicing African-American lawyer in Oberlin, represented Lewis during her trial. Although most witnesses spoke against Lewis and Lewis did not testify, Langston did an excellent job. Lewis was found not guilty of poisoning Miles and Ennes.

Description of Most Popular Artworks

Forever Free, 1867

* This sculpture is of white marble. It represents a man standing, staring up, and raising his left arm into the air. Wrapped around his left wrist is a chain; however, this chain is not restraining him whatsoever. To his right is a woman kneeling with her hands held in a prayer position. The man’s right hand is gently placed on her right shoulder. Forever Free is a representation of the emancipation of African-American slaves after the Civil War. Lewis attempted to break stereotypes of African-American women with this sculpture. For example, Lewis portrayed the woman as completely dressed while the man was partially dressed. This drew attention away from the notion of African-American women being sexual and erotic figures. This sculpture is also a representation of the end of the Civil War. While African-Americans were technically free, they continued to be restrained, shown by the fact that the couple had chains wrapped around their bodies. This piece is at the Howard University Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Hagar, 1875

* This sculpture inspired by a Biblical character from the Old Testament was made of white marble. It shows Hagar with her hands in prayer staring slightly up but not straight across. Hagar was the Egyptian wife of Abraham and gave birth to his first son Ishmael. Abraham’s second wife, Sarah, resented Hagar and “cast Hagar into the wilderness after the birth Sarah’s son Isaac.” Lewis uses the Egyptian Hagar as a representation of the African mother. Hagar symbolizes the abuse of African women. Lewis had a tendency to sculpt historically strong women. We see this not just in Hagar but also in Lewis’s Cleopatra piece. Lewis also depicted regular women in great situations, emphasizing their strength.

Old Arrow-Maker and his Daughter, 1866

* This sculpture was inspired by Lewis’s Native American heritage. It represents an arrow-maker and his daughter sitting on a round base. They are dressed in traditional Native American clothes and have typical Native American facial features. Lewis pushed the limits with the accuracy of her sculptures. Lewis never cleaned up or generalized the appearance of those represented in her sculptures. Instead, she found truth in the stereotypes and used that in her work. She wanted to be as realistic as possible

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