Art, // January 4, 2018
Joyce J. Scott
It might seem that hand-threaded beads and blown glass wouldn’t lend themselves to depicting rank ugliness. Nor to provoking unruly laughter. But Joyce J. Scott’s art — angry, raucous and shamelessly gorgeous — proves just how sharp glass can get. The exhibition of her work now at Grounds for Sculpture, in Hamilton, N.J., is a revelation, inviting covetous attention to what often turn out, on close inspection, to be brutal subjects: vicious racism, violent misogyny. And it signals a marked change of direction for a sculpture garden that had long deserved a reputation for being a little lonesome, and a little odd.
