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.
Artist and educator John T. Scott, one of New Orleans’ most nationally renowned and respected visual artists, died Saturday morning at Methodist Hospital in Houston. He was 67.
As years go, 2005 was a big one for acclaimed African-American sculptor John Scott. In May of that year, a retrospective exhibition of the then 65-year-old artist”s work was held at the New Orleans Museum of Art. It was a big success by all the measures that matter.
Art, by its very nature, is worth more than the ingredients that give it shape. A clay pot is worth more than the lump of clay from which it was formed, a painting more than the paint and canvas. Similarly, the bronze sculptures in John Scott’s eastern New Orleans studio were worth more than the bronze itself.
The thieves may not have known what exactly they stumbled onto when they climbed through a broken window of a nondescript warehouse in eastern New Orleans.
In his efforts to recount the picturesque scenes and bodily sensations of Congo Square — an open space for slaves in antebellum New Orleans — author Henry Edward Durell (under the nom de plume Henry Didimus) invoked a flood of images in the preceding epigraph. Geometrical shapes meet human bodies in this descriptive whirl of music-making and dancing. The interminable, incessant sounds of drumming, singing, crying, shouting, and rhythmic pounding are conceived as a form of music that, on the face of it, has no end.
John Scott has spent his life transforming metal and wood into visual stories about black culture in New Orleans.
But the artist’s biggest challenge may be his latest: turning the derelict Lincoln Beach into a premier recreation spot while preserving its rich history through art.