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Bound and Unbound

Judith Scott–Bound and Unbound exhibition at Brooklyn Museum focuses on Scott’s critically acclaimed fiber-wrapped, three-dimensional constructions.

Judith Scott was in her mid-40s when she began making art at Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, California. Born with Down syndrome, and largely deaf and mute, she was institutionalized in Ohio for thirty-five years before her twin sister introduced her to Creative Growth’s unique studio program for
artists with developmental disabilities in 1987.

Focusing intently on one work at a time, she fashioned each piece over a period of weeks or months, before signaling definitively that the object was finished – and then promptly moved on to start a new one. It was the process itself of making her objects that drove her creativity. Scott would carefully and methodically assemble a work by tying, weaving, binding, and enveloping a found object – or multiple found objects – ranging from something as small as a ring or a piece of paper, to a bundle of twigs, an electric fan, a child’s chair, or a shopping cart. The original inspirational object was often ultimately enveloped and hidden.

Although Scott worked intuitively and without apparent influences or precedents, the result of her efforts is a remarkable body of highly sophisticated and multilayered sculptures closely related to current developments in contemporary art.

Presented in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Judith Scott – Bound and Unbound brings the work of an artist personally removed from politics into a conversation about the role that secondwave feminism and the disability rights movement played in making it possible for her to become an artist understood today as significant and influential. The exhibition critiques the long, unresolved, and losing struggle to categorize and quantify art by people with disabilities into a discrete school or movement, intentionally removed from the larger frames of social and cultural history. Ultimately, the exhibition also presents a voice in the contemporary art world that resonates and engages, and also challenges us with complex questions about how best to balance exceptional biographical narratives within larger critical discussions of an artist’s work.

Judith Scott–Bound and Unbound, Untitled, 2000, Fiber and found objects, overall: 25 x 12 x 10 in. (63.5 x 30.5 x 25.4 cm)

Judith Scott–Bound and Unbound, Untitled, 1993, Fiber and found objects, overall: 36 x 20 x 10 in. (91.4 x 50.8 x 25.4 cm)

Judith Scott–Bound and Unbound, Untitled, 1989, Fiber and found objects overall: 45 1/8 x 22 x 10 in. (114.6 x 55.9 x 25.4 cm). Courtesy The Museum of Everything

Judith Scott–Bound and Unbound, left: Untitled, 2004, Fiber and found objects overall: 29 x 16 x 21 in. (73.7 x 40.6 x 53.3 cm). Collection of Creative Growth; right: Untitled, 2004, Fiber and found objects, overall: 21 x 16 x 16 in. (53.3 x 40.6 x 40.6 cm)

until 29 March 2015
Judith Scott – Bound and Unbound
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn, New York

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Bound and Unbound

Judith Scott–Bound and Unbound exhibition at Brooklyn Museum focuses on Scott’s critically acclaimed fiber-wrapped, three-dimensional constructions.

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