Judith Scott

“It was through the creation of her sculptures that she was empowered to discover a language through which she could express the unspoken and find a voice to communicate with the outside world. Creative Growth gave her this opportunity and the universal language of art gave her this voice.”

–– Joyce Wallace Scott, Judith Scott’s twin sister, 2016

Judith Scott is known for her intuitively assembled mixed-media sculptures that envelop found objects with dense layers of fiber threads and fabric scraps. Since the late 1980s, her complex abstractions have evidenced her powerful drive toward self-expression and connection with others. 

Scott and her fraternal twin sister, Joyce, were raised in rural Ohio in the late 1940s. Judith Scott was diagnosed with Down syndrome shortly after birth. At the time, this chromosomal abnormality was not medically understood and people with disabilities were routinely stigmatized and treated inhumanely. Scott was separated from her family and institutionalized at age seven, lacking sufficient medical, physical, and emotional care for the next thirty-six years. Scott’s deafness, likely caused by a childhood illness, was long undiagnosed, further hindering language development and exacerbating her mental isolation. The growing disability rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, anchored largely in California, resulted in public and legislative victories that paved the way for Scott’s sister to become her legal guardian and coordinate her move to Berkeley in 1985.   

In April 1987, at age forty-five, Scott began attending Oakland’s Creative Growth Art Center, a nonprofit studio and gallery program designed for artists with developmental disabilities. This new and unprecedented environment fostered Scott’s turn to creativity as a self-driven mode of expression. Scott initially completed a few rhythmic drawings and paintings at Creative Growth and ultimately found her medium through a fiber class led by artist Sylvia Seventy in late 1987. As Tom di Maria, director emeritus of Creative Growth who worked with Scott for nearly six years reflected, Scott “took that time to develop her own language system and found a way to use art as her form of communicating with the world.” 

In 1988, Scott created her first sculpture, a bundle of wooden sticks wrapped in fabric and bound by strands of yarn, and arrived at her signature process by the mid-1990s through daily studio sessions. “She started wrapping,” Scott’s twin sister recounted, “Yarn disappeared. Magazines disappeared. Even chairs and bike wheels disappeared. All of it would emerge later in colorfully woven sculptures.” Scott’s tightly encased cocoons, such as Untitled (ca. 1990–2005, SAAM), conceal an array of personally meaningful and scavenged materials that constituted a language entirely of her own making, one connecting the complexities of her inner world to those surrounding her. Later, Scott’s pieces increased to human scale, as in Untitled (1994, SAAM) with her collected objects becoming the heart and bones of her organic forms. These sculptures demonstrate an interest in the interior and exterior relationships that characterize human interaction, evoking her own personal and artistic journeys. 

In the face of decades of trauma and psychic alienation, Scott established a vital artistic practice that conveyed her emotions and selfhood, forged relationships with others, and forever changed the way the art world regards artists with disabilities. With some two hundred works created in her lifetime, Scott’s webbed abstractions constitute tools for connection and survival.

Authored by Gabriella Shypula, American Women’s History Initiative Writer and Editor, 2024.