Judith Scott - Art

Art

On April 1, 1987, Judith Scott started going to the Creative Growth Art Center. In her first few months at the center, Judith was unexceptional with paint. She scribbled loops and circles, but her work contained no representational imagery, and she was so uninterested in creating it that her sister was considering ending her involvement with the program.

Some months later Judith casually observed a fiber art class conducted by visiting artist Sylvia Seventy, and using the materials to hand, spontaneously invented her own unique and radically different form of artistic expression. While other students were stitching, she was sculpting with an unprecedented zeal and concentration.

Her special creativity was quickly recognised, and she was given complete freedom to choose her own materials. Taking found objects (often stealing them from other people at the Center) she would wrap them in carefully selected colored yarns to create diverse sculptures in many different shapes. Some resemble cocoons or body parts, while others are elongated totemic poles. Many of her works also feature pairs; Scott's experience as a twin is essential to her work.

Scott's work became immensely popular in the world of outsider art, and her pieces sold for up to $15,000. Her art is held in the permanent collections of the following museums: Art Brut Connaissance & Diffusion Collection (Paris and Prague), Museum of American Folk Art (Manhattan, New York), Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art (Chicago, Illinois), L’Aracine Musee D’Art Brut (Paris, France), Collection de l'art brut (Lausanne, Switzerland), and the American Visionary Art Museum (Baltimore, Maryland).

Judith Scott died of natural causes at her sister's home in Dutch Flat, California, at the age of 61. She outlived her life expectancy at birth by almost fifty years.